


Morilden

by The_Carnivorous_Muffin



Series: Lily and the Art of Being Sisyphus [69]
Category: Den lille Havfrue | The Little Mermaid - Hans Christian Andersen, Hamlet - Shakespeare, Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Angst, Attempted Murder, Betrayal, F/M, Fairy Tale Elements, Female Harry Potter, Multi, Murder, Mythology References, Romance, Tragedy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-21
Updated: 2019-08-20
Packaged: 2020-09-23 01:23:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 24,057
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20331721
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Carnivorous_Muffin/pseuds/The_Carnivorous_Muffin
Summary: A little mermaid, dreaming of a world above the surface which reflects the hope she has in mankind, once meets a little prince dreaming of kingship, honor, and glory. However, like the sun glimmering on the surface of the sea, sometimes dreams, while beautiful, cannot be held in one's hands.





	1. Act I, Scene i

**Author's Note:**

> Obligatory note of NOT CANON

Act I: The Little Mermaid

* * *

_“Far out in the ocean the water is as blue as the petals of the loveliest cornflower, as clear as the purest glass, and yet deep, deeper than any anchor could reach, many steeples would have to be stacked one on top of another to reach the bottom to the surface of the sea. It is down there that the sea folk live.”_

\- The Little Mermaid, Hans Christian Andersen

* * *

Act I, Scene i

* * *

Since the very beginning of when she was herself, nameless and unwanted yet capable of thought and memory, she had held a distinct fascination for the world that was miles and miles above her head. There, beyond the surface of the sea, where the water faded and the cool crisp biting air would take over in an ever shifting blue that served as that separate sea they called the sky, was a world of endless possibility.

More, a world of sentient beings, mirrors of merfolk, who instead of wearing the tails and scales of fish on their lower halves had this replaced with strange stalk like limbs, bizarre mirrors of their arms and hands, which they then used to maneuver about the rocks of land and their floating islands.

It was a common, almost unacknowledged truth, that there was little of interest among humankind or the surface in general among her people. The great blinding star of the day, the sun, was far too bright and its sister the moon offered little more comfort. Land itself was unbroachable, a barren wasteland without salt or the sea and while pretty once or twice to view at a distance offered no true possibility. And humans themselves, well…

According to her aunt and uncle, her cousin when he opened his almost whale like gaping mouth to repeat whatever they said (as was his favorite pastime), history had not painted them or their floating islands in any kind light.

“That’s how the king’s wife went, you know, humans with their spears and their nets,” her uncle, a great walrus of a merman his whiskers floated with each harrumph said, “Downright shame is what it is, but then, everyone knows nothing good ever comes of humans.”

Here he harrumphed again, emulating again a great walrus of the north, while like eager seals her cousin and aunt barked in agreement. She herself was not a part of this discussion as she wasn’t a part of any true discussion, it was a long acknowledged fact that she was an orphan, her parents long since vanished in some pitiful accident, and that her mother’s sister’s family had never truly wanted her to begin with.

Ever since she could remember she had acted as a servant for the family, hunting and preparing food when needed, often finding herself in fights for her life with little more than a spear to protect her from the great predators of the sea, and otherwise being told to keep to her own devices and out of their precious son’s way lest she corrupt him.

Here her stupid baby whale of a cousin, flapping his arms and fins excitedly, parroted back what her uncle had told him at some point, “It’s so funny when their islands crash into rocks because of singing!”

Cue more excited seal like barks of laughter while she had floated there, carving her own dinner from what remained of the catch, and wondering just what it was she was missing. What did they see that she couldn’t? Or rather, what did she see, that they seemed utterly incapable of seeing for themselves?

True, there was violence between them and the humans. There was history of merfolk sitting upon the rocks and singing humans to steer their floating sailing islands into the rocks, casting their strangely shaped and garbed bodies into the sea to be devoured by the carrion fish. Similarly, there were tales of humans on these floating islands, hurling hooked javelins into the sea to hunt not only fish and whales but also the merfolk themselves.

None the less though, there was no true connection between them, the merfolk and the humans. They were, they were hunting parties, passing each other in the night, the sea dark and themselves silent, unaware that they had so close passed by another free thinking being.

Humans built themselves floating islands, covered themselves in a substance similar to the furred skin of seals, decorated their spears and javelins and shaped them into something new, and on the land itself they built palaces where they trapped dancing red stars in transparent stone so that at night their cities were colorful mirrors of the stars themselves.

And these were merely the wonders she could see from the edge of land, camped out on sandbars and staring into the cities by the sea. Strange towers built of the stone of the land itself, reaching upwards towards the stars and the sun, surrounded by towering kelp that was stronger and thicker and made of the same substance as their floating islands. More, she was certain that further inland, past where her own green eyes could see, were whole worlds beyond her imagining filled with captured stars, carved towers, and glittering stone.

Perhaps it was these tantalizing visions that made her wonder, even when her cousin seemed barely capable of wondering at all though they were close in age, whether the world she’d found herself born into was real at all. The sea, though vast, had a sort of cramped dullness to it.

The palace only a few miles in the distance, spires glittering in the distant sunlight passing through the waves, almost like their human equivalent yet not quite, seemed to support the same activities daily. The princesses always were singing, the king was always ruling, the people were always coming and going about their own repetitive and mundane business and none seemed to have any inclination to do or think anything else.

On the edge of the great merfolk city, where her own family of caricatures lived, it was even more so. Her uncle seemed to have only so many thoughts that he would repeat his fondest ones at his own leisure, her aunt similarly would always laugh at the same unwitty jokes and bark out the same commands to her, girl where is the supper, and her pitiful cousin was worse than the pair of them combined.

The point was, that the longer she lived and stayed and grew with these people, locked into a dark cove at night while they dreamed of the next meal on their plates, the less she could believe in their sentience. They were little more than fish dreaming they were merfolk, instilled with the belief that they were free thinking beings. In actuality they were like the human toys that would sometimes fall and then rust in the sea. These figurines of gleaming stone would be motionless, and then, with a handle on their back, you would wind them up and watched as their funny lower halves would move this way and that, in a repetitive motion, until the handle stopped turning and they jerked into an unnatural standstill.

Her aunt, cousin, and uncle reminded her a lot of these human oddities.

And in noticing that the humans had managed to create these things, so like her family in all the ways that mattered, she wondered if they hadn’t known the truth of it from the start. That perhaps, perhaps mankind was like she was, alone and separate and always thinking and so very different from everyone around them. Perhaps, perhaps it was not the world above that was unreal, but the world below that was a dim and subpar reflection of the world of men. That the merfolk, themselves, were merely soulless replications of some greater fundamental idea.

This, at least, long before she was old enough to leave her family and fend for herself, or even old enough to take a mate and spawn children, was what she chose to believe.

And then she met the little prince, and everything changed.

It was twilight, the great red eye of the sun setting, the sky turning that orange color that reflected the water and the light shimmering off of its surface. Above her head, as she breached the surface and breathed in the cold sweet air that jarred her lungs, the gulls circled overhead crying. The waves, rough for the season, rocked her body as her eyes turned this way and that, searching for the shore and the human city and the great islands with billowing clouds that would sail them across the sea.

However, she was further away from the city than she had thought, she could see it, but it was leagues from where she was now floating, the current likely having carried her farther away than she’d expected. Instead there was a larger singular building with many towers, larger than anything she had seen in the city, decorated with spires as well as brightly colored sheets of fabric that billowed in the breeze.

It looked, though not truly, not really, somewhat like the palace where the sea king and his daughters the princesses lived. It was made of human stone, surrounded by symmetrically shaped and colorful plant life as well as that strange human polished stone that gleamed under the sun, but all the same no matter how different it looked it had that same feeling to it.

As if a land king, instead of a sea king, might reside inside of it with seven daughters of his own.

She considered that thought silently for a moment, the parallel ruler of the land rather than the sea, and what the inside of his court might look like. Though she herself, being an unwanted orphan, had no basis of comparison as she’d never been invited inside the palace or allowed anywhere near it.

Far too much of a possibility of embarrassing her relatives.

Her eyes then drifted further and there, off the shore, she spotted a little vessel, a brightly colored tiny little island wobbling off the coast, which had to be at least a tenth the side of the normal floating islands that men liked to ride upon. There, inside, a little dark-haired human, himself at least a quarter of the size of the humans she regularly saw on these sorts of vessels.

She watched him for a moment, the way his island rocked back and forth in the waves as he adjusted the billowing single cloud on the tower in the center, and then with raised eyebrows watched as the island overturned and its single occupant was tossed into the sea.

And though the island bounced up and down, before slowly filling with water and sinking to join its drowned brethren, the human himself did not come back up.

Now, she’d seen these island wrecks before but they were chaotic things, filled with the screaming of men, the cracking and sinking of their islands, and often times their captured stars would grow hot and spread wildly as they reached upwards towards their forsaken heavens. In other words, they were dangerous things, and to go too close was to risk her own death for humans who were no doubt soon for whatever world awaited them after death.

As a result while she’d seen humans at a distance, and sometimes close, she’d never truly gotten her hands on a body or really been able to inspect one or their strange lower halves. This tiny island, merely capsized and not splintering in two or burning bright, and this tiny human, were very non-threatening by comparison.

As a result, staring at the scene, she realized she had been granted a priceless opportunity that might never come again.

She wasted no time in ducking her head beneath the waves, searching, and finding the still form of the boy, his chest empty of air and filling with water by the minute, and dragged his pale and drowned form towards a nearby cave facing the sea.

There, hauling him up on the rocks, tilting his jaw this way and that, checking for movement of any kind, she then began to tear off his outer garb with her knife, casting it off to the side and revealing smooth pale skin beneath.

Though half-sized he didn’t looked malformed, his upper half and lower half were roughly the same proportion as each other, more there was a symmetry and beauty to his pale face that she hadn’t seen in any merfolk before, not even the youngest princess who was said to be the most beautiful of all the sea king’s daughters. His fingers were long, nails gleaming in the light of the moon that shone through the roof of the cave, his chest like that not of a merman but rather a child who would one day grow into a man, perhaps marking him as a half-grown human rather than a stunted one.

His hair was dark, darker than the depths of the sea and the caves of the deep, his lashes and brows a similar color.

However, it was his legs, like all human legs, which held her interest. Like his arms they were twins of one another, the same shape and size, both with knobs of bone roughly in the middle serving as the elbow of his leg. Lifting one and moving it this way and that, bending it inward, she noticed that it didn’t move like an arm, but rather, somewhat like one. It bent on this one hinge but it moved in different directions, was not as flexible, and seemed to have a purpose of pushing down, providing him balance on the earth.

His feet, the hands of the legs, were not quite hands for that matter. At a distance there was a clear similarity, but up close the thumb of the foot was in the wrong position, he could not grip anything with it, and the small misshapen fingers of his feet moved in only one direction and with less flexibility and dexterity than true fingers.

More, compared to the skin of his hands, these were worn, far more bruised and scuffed by the rocks and winds of land versus his fingers which were smooth and unblemished.

However, the one thing she wasn’t certain of, and more uncertain of whether to call it a disfigurement or else some hidden part of human anatomy that had always been previously hidden by the fur they insisted on wearing, was a third misshapen leg that was nestled between the longer symmetrical pair. This one did not come nearly to the height of the others, was indeed, embarrassingly small, and was a pale squishy looking thing settled there like the head of an eel lying in wait.

Off the top of her head, eyeing it with raised eyebrows, she could think of no function that it could possibly serve him. Reaching down to touch it, moving it this way and that, it didn’t even seem to have any real muscle to it but was instead this shapeless, formless, useless leg.

It was about that point, with one hand on the third leg, the other on the thigh of another leg, that the human spluttered into awareness and proved that somehow, her checking for life hadn’t been as thorough as she’d thought, and he wasn’t dead after all.

She immediately removed her hands, slinking back into the water and clutching at her spear, watching as he curled over, turned, and vomited sea water and bile onto the surface of the rocks. There, wheezing, shivering in the cold, he looked blearily across from her with a pair of startlingly pale blue eyes, like the color of the icebergs in the north.

Breathing, crossing his arms and curling into a ball, shielding his legs and himself from her view, he spoke. It was a strange tongue, his, she’d heard it before screamed by humans as they were sailing or else drowning, but she’d never heard it directly.

Still, as their words had been more or less understandable, so too were his.

Merfolk spoke in the language of the spirit, the soul, of desire and promises, this was why men crashed and drowned for their songs. If they could not speak or listen to the hearts of men, then this would not have been possible.

“Who are you? What do you want with me?”

“Ah,” she said, feeling a little awkward about all of this now, finally she said in his tongue, “I thought you were dead.”

“What?”

“It’s very hard to tell,” she related now, a little annoyed at his own look of outrage, “When we die our bodies turn to sea foam, but you, oh no, you just seem to depart your bodies entirely, leaving them to sink to the bottom of the sea. It’s impossible to tell one way or another!”

His eyes drifted to her knife by his side, seeming to realize in that moment that after inspecting his body she had meant to cut him open. In terror he clutched at it with all the expertise of a novice, earning her own raised eyebrows in turn as he threatened, “If you touch me I will kill you!”

“Well, murder doesn’t really sit well with me anyway,” she noted, brightening as she realized that this, in fact, was much better, “Actually, I’ve never gotten a chance to talk to a human before. Yes, it’s much better that you’re not dead.”

She grinned, quite pleased with this new development. It was one thing to inspect and dissect the body of a dead one to discover all his secrets, the secrets of his lower half, quite another to actually converse with one.

Although, looking at him as he looked at her, took in her own red hair, pale skin, and bright green eyes as well as her green tail, she was suddenly struck by an acute sense of nervousness. No, nervousness wasn’t the word for it, it was far worse than that.

Here wasn’t just her first chance, but perhaps her only chance to make an impression a representative of mankind. More, she wasn’t just representing herself here but her entire people, rectifying centuries of history that had come before now. Everything she had ever thought, wondered, or dreamed lead to this moment.

One might say that this was the climax of her entire existence, pitifully short though it had been thus far.

What if he found her disappointing?

What if he had already found her disappointing or else a threat?

Clearly, judging by his hardened expression, his wild eyes, the way he gripped the knife, she had already made some move that she’d been unaware of. Or perhaps he took to the idea of her cutting up his corpse far more personally than she would have, well, had she been capable. Merfolk did not leave corpses behind when they died, they merely returned to the sea, so it wasn’t really an apt comparison.

Point being, this was her close encounter with humankind, and there was a very high possibility that she would ruin it if she hadn’t already.

Abruptly she dropped her spear, sinking back further into the water, peering up at him and watching as he slowly, but surely, lowered her own knife but leaving it within easy reaching distance.

Finally, she sheepishly said, “I’m sorry about your island.”  


“My what?” he responded.

She floundered, attempting to explain with his words, “Your… floating island, the colorful one, you were in it and…”

“It’s called a boat,” he said, eyes lighting in understanding of what she was trying to get at, much to her own relief, “Or a ship and… It sank?”

She nodded and he seemed to wilt at that, pouting, and placing his head upon his knees with a sigh. After a moment’s thought though, where he seemed to grow more dejected, he noted, “It’s not like anyone will notice anyway, they’ll probably just be upset I didn’t really drown.”

“Ah… Did they want you to drown?” she asked, uncertain herself, as she had always assumed that like the majority of merfolk, humankind would not be fond of ritualistically murdering their young, but one could never tell.

“It’d be convenient,” he scoffed, which she took to mean that none of them would admit hoping for his death, but none of them were quite against it either. Now that, she dearly understood. Her own relatives, no doubt, would not be displeased if she were to one day fail to return from hunting or surveying the surface world.

They might even throw a party to celebrate.

Then, surveying her, with a quiet intensity that she had never seen on the face of her cousin, he asked, “Who are you? You never said.”

She blinked, not quite sure what he was getting at, since he was clearly looking right at her and talking to her. Clearly, he could see who she was for himself. Or perhaps he meant something deeper than that, deeper than her skin, her eyes, her tail, or even her hair. Though what that might be, what he expected, was entirely beyond her.

“Your name,” he prompted.

“Name?” she asked, truly lost now, looking down at her own hands then up at him as if they might reveal the answer. They didn’t.

“What do others call you?” he prompted again, this time his look of annoyance fading into one of fascination as if her lack of answer was revealing in and of itself.

“They… don’t,” she finally said, and they didn’t, they never had.

“You don’t have one, do you?” he said finally, leaning forward and scrambling towards her, the knife forgotten as he sat on the edge of the water, grinning at her.

“My father,” he said suddenly, eyes bright as he looked at her, “They say my real father was a nøkk, like you but he lived in the rivers and streams and waterfalls. He could take the shape of a horse or a beautiful fiddler. If you say the name of a nøkk, their real name, it kills them. Are you like that?”

She mused, nøkk, she’d never heard that term before but then she’d never really met a human before and had never heard their term for them. And a name… Perhaps she had one, but it was the single beautiful cry that would reduce her into foam, her own siren’s song. If she heard it, or even knew it, likely it would kill her just as he’d said.

Finally, she said with a shrug, “I don’t know.”

“I bet you are,” he assured himself with a smile, leaning back as he took the sight of her in full, strange blue eyes tracing every inch of her, “I bet you can do all sorts of magic.”

“My name’s Tom,” he finally said, pale hand motioning towards himself, “I’m the crown prince of Denmark.”

He paused at his own words, looking up at the sky, frowning, before darkly adding, “Or I should be crown prince of Denmark.”

“What’s Denmark?” she cut in, and a prince, the sea king had no sons so there were no princes currently but she wondered if this meant he lived in the land palace she had spotted earlier. His island, no, boat, coming from there would make quite a bit of sense. It didn’t seem large enough to cover the vast distances that greater ships could navigate.

“Denmark is… Well, we’re in Denmark now, it’s the kingdom we’re in,” then, affronted at her lack of understanding he added, “We’re speaking Danish, how can you not know what Denmark is?!”

“You speak Danish,” she corrected, pointing to him before pointing to herself, “Therefore I speak Danish.”

That seemed as much of a non-concept to him as names were to her. The idea that her words, her voice, was designed to reach to his very soul and beckon him closer towards treacherous waters didn’t even compute. 

“Well, that doesn’t make any sense,” he said crossing his arms but seemed to give up on this soon enough as he asked, “Anyways all the cities on the beach, the castle, everything is a part of Denmark. If you go to other shores they might be part of some other kingdom, but this is Denmark.”

She wasn’t quite sure she understood that, the naming of land, you couldn’t name waters in the same way. The water moved in currents and changed daily, and sure there was the palace and landmarks around it, but the sea was vast and untamable. One did not simply name it and place borders around it.

Still, watching him, she could feel something bright and satisfied within her. He was young, true, but there was a spark in him, a kindred piece of light within him that beckoned to her. He, she was certain, was what she had been looking for. Everything light and dark, joyful are wrathful, contained within his small growing form was the promise of sentience that she had dreamed in mankind.

There was such… potential within him.

“What is it like?” she asked, “Being human?”

He blinked, somewhat unsettled, and then with a wry sort of mirth said, “I imagine it’s a lot like being not human. I’ve only ever been human, I don’t think I’d know the difference.”

He looked down at her, considering then said, “I study, most days, with my younger half-brother, James. Economics, mathematics, kingship, all sorts of sciences that a king of Denmark will need one day when our father dies. Some days we practice fencing or go riding in the fields…”  


He talked for what seemed like hours while she stared, overwhelmed by the strange terms he used, but unable to interrupt for her own growing enchantment in the world he painted of a human prince.

He was young for a human, he admitted this, long before the age where he would take a human wife or even be allowed to hunt on his own. However, like her, he was often left to his own devices for reasons having to do with his biological father (a story he seemed unwilling to get into the details of or even separate from the king, the other man he called father).

His days were filled with sunlight and nights with starlight, with riding upon great creatures called horses, through fields of the seaweed of land known as grass and golden wheat. He talked about the seasons, how the temperature of the water not only changed, but the landscape itself would transform and the animals of land would migrate and return for the warmer flowering months of Spring and Summer.

And in turn she, to the best of her ability, painted the life beneath the waves for him. Speaking of migrating whales, of the great vast kingdom of the sea without border, the merfolk and their oral histories dating back generations, and the palace beneath the sea with the seven princesses.

Still, how was it, that her words seemed to enrapture him just as his enraptured her?

How could he see so much in the world she lived in, in the false reality he lived in, when there was so much within his own?

Later, the dawn approaching and after they had long since run out of words and ideas to say, though no doubt there was far more left to be said, he turned towards her again, his eyes lingering on her hair, “You should have a name, a name between us at least, not your real name but… Something that has the spirit of you.”

She liked the idea of that, something that contained the spirit of her, that he might use to warm her memory long since he’d returned to land and herself to the sea.

Still looking at her, eyes roving over her, he seemed to make up his mind as he said, “There’s a story, from the forest of Tiveden, about red water lilies, nøkkerosen.”

Then he began to tell the tale, one he seemed to have long since memorized, his human voice weaving it with all the grace and mastery of her own people, “At the lake of Fagartärn, there was once a poor fisherman who had a beautiful daughter. The small lake gave little fish and the fisherman had difficulties providing for his little family.

One day, as the fisherman was fishing in his little dugout of oak, he met the nøkk, who offered him great catches of fish on the condition that the fisherman gave him his beautiful daughter the day she was eighteen years old. The desperate fisherman agreed and promised the nøkk his daughter.

The day the girl was eighteen she went down to the shore to meet the nøkk. The nøkk gladly asked her to walk down to his watery abode, but the girl took forth a knife and said that he would never have her alive, then stuck the knife into her heart and fell down into lake, dead. Then, her blood colored the water lilies, nøkkerosen, red, and from that day the water lilies of some of the lake’s forests are red.”

He reached forward, grabbed a strand of her hair, held it up to the dawn and inspected the red and gold in each strand, and wistfully said, “Your hair is like that, I think, so you should be Nøkkerosen.”

And in that moment, staring at him, she was tempted to take him with her back into the sea, to somehow preserve him so that he would not drown but could instead remain and grow into a human man.

Or else herself join him on land, to somehow remain as she was without withering and turning back into foam, somehow maneuvering without the legs that were so necessary on the surface.

But as a fish and a bird could not wed, so she herself, was tied to the waves and him to the shores of Denmark. So she didn’t say anything, she just nodded, accepted Nøkkerosen for herself, to warm her hands as the sunlight did her skin, a silent token of his passing into and out of her life and, knocking him out and supporting him back to shore, she laid him and his ruined garments back onto the Danish beach by the land palace.

And as he laid there, eyes closed once again, the sunlight reflecting off his pale skin, she felt…

She felt as if there was a sun inside of herself, a bright glowing overbearing thing in her heart, and a certainty that all the faith she’d had in the world above, every dream she’d painted of them, had been more than met in him.

He, Tom the little prince of Denmark, was all the proof she needed that humanity was more than worth every gift bestowed upon them.

And with that thought, with the rising sun and shouts from the beach as the humans spotted the boy, she returned back into the depths of the sea and the flat, disappointing, reality that awaited her there.


	2. Act I, Scene ii

_“Increasingly she grew to like human beings, and more and more she longed to live among them. Their world seemed so much wider than her own, for they could skim over the sea in ships, and mount up into the lofty peaks high over the clouds, and their lands stretched out in woods and fields farther than the eye could see.”_

Hans Christian Andersen, The Little Mermaid

* * *

Act I, scene ii

* * *

In the weeks, months, and years that followed she often found herself emerging from the surface of the sea to watch the palace of men. The Danish prince did not make a reappearance, or at least, not as he had that one day.

Often, at a distance, she’d catch sight of a small pale dark-haired human staring out toward the sea, seated on the beach, accompanied sometimes by half sized another dark-haired human or else one whose hair was a brighter orange, but he was never again brave enough or stupid enough to drown himself at sea in tiny boats.

Or, she sometimes thought as she thrust her own spear into the flesh of a great gray fish, perhaps he had, and she had simply never noticed. Perhaps he was already dead and gone, drowned in the sea or even on land, while she had been hunting or with the Dursleys.

However, she liked to believe he was alive.

It was a bad habit, she knew it, but often she would hold that name, Nøkkerosen, to herself in the night and when she thought of the promise of humanity it wore his face and his pale blue eyes. It provided light, she thought, like the light of twilight shimmering on the surface of the sea, to those hopes and dreams she had always held. None the less, he provided something real and tangible to where before there had only been possibilities.

She began to investigate the sunken floating islands, the wrecked ships of mankind, with an obsession that would have alarmed her relatives if they knew. No, that kind of behavior would have alarmed anyone if they knew. Such places were best left to be reclaimed by the sea, conquered by coral and algae and taken back by the waters.

However, as time passed by, as she became older, leaner in some places and curved in others, she found herself sifting through them, wiping away the green algae from their surfaces and marking the faded colors, patterns, and symbols that humanity had so carefully carved into these sacred places.

And they were sacred, there was divinity in these hollowed and hallowed drowned halls of mankind, as there was divinity in everything they touched…

She had asked her uncle, once, when she was feeling brave, stupid, or else impatient, “Why don’t men, when they die, simply turn back into the air or the dust of land? Why do their bodies become hollow like the shells of crabs?”

This was soon after meeting the Danish Prince, and she had itched in those first weeks something awful, a taste of such excitement and then to return to the sea was almost unbearable. She still had so many questions, but that had lingered almost more than any of the others, that idea that she’d had no idea if he was living or dead when she’d taken him to the grotto to dissect him.

“What idiocy are you barking now, girl?” her uncle harrumphed, his face growing purple to match the dark maroon of his fins, and very likely he’d soon hit her or at the very least banish her to the small cove they liked to keep her in at night.

“Men, when they die, when they stay in water too long and stop moving, their bodies don’t do anything. They just… go still,” she’d seen it, from a distance, watched as their bodies had sunk further and further into the sea and how they had not even twitched as the sharks descended and feasted upon them.

“What are you worrying about dying men for?!” her uncle barked, mustache whiskers floating in agitation as he took in her pensive expression, “Downright indecent, if you ask me. Look here, girl, you’re lucky we took you in at all, add your nonsense on top of that and we practically deserve an award.”

In the end she hadn’t learned her answer from him, no, she hadn’t learned it from anyone. In the end it was memories of the boy, the little prince, that provided at least the glimmerings of an answer.

At one point in his recollection of wheat, horses, the seasons, and even the sun, the boy had said abruptly, “They say that nøkk, that merfolk, are godless creatures without souls. That they aren’t children of god, is that true?”

She had looked at him, at the way the moonlight had caught in his dark hair and his pale eyes, the open curiosity and fascination on his face as he regarded her and all that she was. Then, she’d said, “I don’t know, what is a soul?”

He’d blinked, somewhat taken aback, as if this was a question one simply did not and could not ask. Then it was as if an epiphany had taken hold, he’d looked at her, at her tail, and realized that she was not like him, that something was inherently different between them.

“A soul is… It’s what drives your body, it’s that part of us that is immortal, that when we die is connected to God and will live on forever either in Hell or Heaven.”

She had stared out into the darkness of the grotto, the jagged edges of the stone forming this small secluded island in the sea, then she’d said quietly, “No, we are like the seaweed, once we’re cut down, there is nothing. Only seafoam, the breath of the sea, a hint of a memory that the sea once dreamed…”

And at once there had been a conflicted expression on the boy’s face, as if even he could not quite believe his own words or hers yet believed them enough to look down on her as this souled being, and pity.

For inside his body of clay was a great eternal light, like that of the distant sun, which when his body fell would rise through the air and into the stars and see all the wonders that even she herself could not dream of.

And that look on his face, it had been so bitter and so sweet, that even the memory of it almost always choked her.

He’d said though a strange thing then, a sentence that sounded older than he himself was, the kind of words you’d expect from a learned and mated merman rather than a child who had yet to hunt, “If I could, I’d share mine with you.”

“What?”

His eyes glowed though, and there was both sobriety in mirth in this promise, as if he knew he was making light of something he had no reason to, that any other human would have chastised him for, “To tell the truth, I don’t think the soul is worth much. If my father, my real father, didn’t have one, then I don’t see why I have to care so much about mine. If I could, I think I’d share mine with you, half for you and half for me, and then you’d have yourself an immortal soul too.”

They’d then moved onto other things, onto details of his half-brother, the other prince, James, but never the less the words lingered and bloomed within the dark corners of her mind. She came to believe, to cherish the thought, that everything mankind touched, whether intentionally or not, held the afterglow of that invisible soul.

In these sunken ruins of mankind, then, she could almost see the face of mankind’s God.

However, as the years passed, it became clear that this was all she could ever see. Her relatives remained defiant, deliberately uninterested, even her cousin too stupid to understand when she built palaces of men with her hands and her words, tales of cities like Copenhagen and what they must look like, what a street or streetlight looked like, windows, glass, bottles, all these small human wonders that the little prince had so easily dismissed.

She collected them, inspected them, green transparent stone he’d called glass, turning them this way and that in her hands, their perfect and strange shapes, bright and bold colors not faded by sun or sea, and how she coveted. Years and years passed, her body transforming from a girl’s into a mermaid’s, to the point where soon her relatives would seek to marry her off to some desperate merman too stupid to tell that he had gotten an unfair bargain.

She…

Before she even had the words for it, the thought, the image in her mind, she found herself wanting more than what she was now. She wanted the world, she wanted the little Danish prince to take her hand, to somehow turn her beautiful tail into strange pale legs and take her to the world.

The world that was real, with cobblestone streets, churches, school houses, and palaces where for miles and miles she could… walk, that was the word, walk upon the land with her feet and his hand in hers.

He’d take her to that world, and he’d show her how everything was done, how the human world could both glitter and be gold in the same instant, and he’d move her to the sun.

A world of skies, that was bursting with surprise, to open up her eyes with joy…

And for all that it was only a silly, stupid, dream of a boy who would someday, at some point in time, be a man with a wife of his own she still thought of it, painted it indelibly in her mind, so that she had memorized every color and every ray of sunlight that it would have.

Then, one day, the king’s youngest beloved daughter was sixteen years old, and everyone in the kingdom was invited to the palace to celebrate.

“Now, girl,” her uncle commanded as they swam towards the palace, glittering in the distant sunlight, though she could hardly be called a girl for much longer if she was even a girl at all, “You will do no funny business, you hear, you will not chatter about men or islands or land, in fact you will not speak at all!”

“Unless I am spoken to?” she replied dully, as one could only ever truly reply to her relatives with a certain dullness in mind.

Her uncle, though he claimed to be well respected and a merman and hunter of gravitas in his youth, at this point seemed to bark like a seal or seagull to anyone dull and dimwitted enough to listen. To those few gatherings she had been invited to, she had marked how other families had often viewed her uncle and his mate with distaste, as if they were a noxious scent that they must tolerate but could not quite rid themselves of.

“Not even then!” her aunt cut in rather sharply, “No, you nod politely, and pretend to be mute.”

She nodded her acquiescence but in truth there was something restless inside of her, as there had been something restless when she had met the little prince, had realized the importance of their own encounter.

This was the only time she had ever been invited to the palace of the sea king, it was the only time anyone she knew had ever been invited. Here, here was her chance to change things, as she had always longed to change them.

If, after all her years of study of human artifacts, of having talked to one, she could convince the king to contact their people. It would change everything, a new world of possibilities would open, there would be trade of goods, services, information, ideas. Humanity could teach them some of their elusive and wonderous secrets and the sea would be transformed into something unrecognizable and grand.

If she could not bring herself to the world of men, then the solution was obvious, she could bring the world of men here.

She hadn’t taken any of their inventions, their javelins, their art, their strange contraptions whose purpose she couldn’t even begin to guess. With her relatives watching her every move she didn’t dare. She had only her words, only her voice and her stories and her imagination, and that would somehow have to be enough.

On the inside the palace glittered, it was carved from thousands upon thousands of shells, from the stone of the sea floor itself, and inside of it was like stepping inside of those tiny enclosed caves that crustaceans carried on their backs. However, there was no sun in here, she thought, nothing like the fire that the little prince had described, and for all that they strived at greatness they always fell short.

Hundreds of merfolk gathered, everyone in the kingdom undoubtedly, in the great ballroom while colorful fish flitted and danced above their heads. There was a dull chatter, her relatives quickly losing and distancing themselves in the crowd from her, leaving her on the outskirts staring in.

As she was always on the outskirts, of both land and sea, staring in.

A great feast had been prepared and laid out in a corner, the flesh of whales and fish a plenty, guarded from sea vermin by a few dark eyed and stoic mermen. In the center she could see her cousin, still too heavy from too much food and too little work, attempting to speak with several disgusted mermaids who had little time for him.

Somewhere across the room, the king’s seven daughters floated on a pedestal shaped like a great clam, seated upon seven overly large pearls, singing out towards their audiences. Their voices, particularly the youngest, were beautiful as the voices of all merfolk, sirens, were beautiful. However, she, Nøkkerosen, could hear them for what they really were.

They sang of love, of embraces, of passion, but little more than that.

Their songs did not ring flat because of their chords but because in essence they promised nothing. They were only words, untried and untested, and she wondered how any man could hear them and possibly be drawn towards them.

For surely, humankind, was above such illusions.

Something cold and pointed worked its way up from her stomach towards her lungs, hitching her breath, and she realized that this was her moment. It would have to be here and now, she would not get another chance.

Suddenly though everything she could possibly say felt inadequate, she could already see their dark baleful eyes, lacking any faith at all in her or her dreams. More, for a moment, she lacked faith in herself.

It would be all too easy to let it go, to return from whence she came and never think about it again, to be what she always was and always would be except… Except then all her dreams would become so shallow, so fragile that they’d instantly shatter, because she had taken her opportunity and squandered it.

If she couldn’t act now, she thought to herself, then she would never be able to truly live with herself.

Like the girl in the prince’s story, the one at the edge of the lake with the water lilies, there could be no might-have-beens, no regrets, and no half-measures for her. It would be her blood, that painted the water lilies, the nøkkerosen, red.

So, she swam, with a confidence she didn’t have, to the center of the stage before the king’s rather confused and annoyed daughters at her audacity.

“Sorry, a moment of your time,” she said, and then, slowly, she turned towards her audience. At the lack of music, they at first muttered, then roared, turning towards her and shouting that she move aside, but she did no such thing.

Instead, she stared, and stated, “I’ve come tonight, like all of you, to celebrate the sixteenth birthday of the youngest princess.”

The youngest princess, the most beautiful of all of them, flushed at the praise but whispered to one of her eldest sisters a question, likely wondering just what Nøkkerosen was doing. In the audience she could now spot her relatives, horrified, embarrassed, and filled with rage but helpless to stop her now lest they implicate themselves.

“However, I have also come to deliver a message, an idea, one that has haunted me for as long as I can remember. I’ve come to speak to you about the world of men.”

A jeer sounded from the audience, one, then two, she spoke over them.

“We have never kept contact with them, except to sing them to their deaths and damnation, and because of that we have stagnated. They have built worlds, palaces, above our heads and we have contented ourselves to ignore this? Why? Why are we so insistent on seclusion, on outdated isolation? Is it fear, well let’s talk to them and see what it is they truly want! It’s certainly not our flesh and surely they will see it’s better to work together than remain apart,” her eyes searched each and every face, looking for something, anything, a single hint of a kindred spirit among them.

“Is it sheer laziness? Arrogance in our own superiority and way of life? Do we really intend to stagnate here and rot and stay as we always are when we have so many problems of our own? Look at what they’ve made, look at the wonderful things they’ve made from great floating islands to strange, perfectly shaped, stone? Tell me, tell me there isn’t something wonderful, something enviable, in there! Tell me that you haven’t once looked over the surface of the water and wondered…”

She fell silent, guards were approaching, sour faced and unamused, the king looked down at her in judgement, and in the crowd, there was not a face looking at her even in pity. She was alone, as she had always, and would ever be alone.

“I wasn’t thinking,” she said flatly when they returned, early, thrown out of the palace and told to stay out.

“You are incapable of thinking!” her aunt spat, “You have always been incapable of thinking! Of having any normal thought at all!”

“I had too much faith.”

They did not comment on this, instead, as they reached their home, her home for all these years, her uncle threw her javelin into the sand beside her, her knives soon followed, “Get out.”

She said nothing, staring at the spear, her spear, crafted by her own hands when none other would be given to her. It looked so small, so flimsy and fragile, sticking out of the sand like that.

“Get out,” her uncle repeated, “You’ve gone too far this time, you’re no longer welcome in these waters, in this kingdom!”

He then pointed a thick meaty arm out into the wilderness, the great unconquered wastelands of the world, “This is your only chance, girl, leave, or I swear on my father and my son and all of my ancestors I will kill you myself and be done with you. But you will wander, alone, unwanted, unneeded, and you will never come back here! Do you hear me?!”

She picked the javelin out of the earth, strapping it into a fashioned holster on her back, placed the knives in there as well, and then stared one last time at her misshapen relatives as well as the palace looming behind them.

Too fat and too large for her cousin and uncle, too thin for her aunt, and against the backdrop of even the splendid palace there was nothing within them. There was nothing within this kingdom, for all that glittered, the prince had told her, was not gold.

Then, without a word, Nøkkerosen of nowhere and nothing, kinless and friendless, turned towards the bitter waters of the north, and swam into exile.


	3. Act I, Scene iii

_“I know exactly what you want,’ said the sea witch. ‘It is very foolish of you, but just the same you shall have your way, for it will bring you to grief, my proud princess. You want to get rid of your fish tail and have two props instead, so that you can walk about like a human creature, and have the young Prince fall in love with you, and win him and an immortal soul besides.’ At this, the witch gave such a loud cackling laugh that the toad and the snakes were shaken to the ground, where they lay writhing._

_‘You are just in time,’ said the witch. ‘After the sun comes up tomorrow, a whole year would have to go by before I could be of any help to you. I shall compound you a draught, and before sunrise you must swim to the shore with it, seat yourself on dry land, and drink the draught down. Then your tail will divide and shrink until it becomes what the people on earth call a pair of shapely legs. But it will hurt; it will feel as if a sharp sword slashed through you. Everyone who sees you will say that you are the most graceful human being they have ever laid eyes on, for you will keep your gliding movement and no dancer will be able to tread as lightly as you. But every step you take will feel as if you were treading upon knife blades so sharp that blood must flow. I am willing to help you, but are you willing to suffer all this?”_

Hans Christian Andersen, The Little Mermaid

* * *

Act I, Scene iii

* * *

First, she went north, away from the land and the waters familiar to her, up into the cold and bitter waves past where any sane mermaid or merman would ever venture. Further, certainly, then even she had ever ventured in all her years of living.

The boy, the prince, had explained that human stolen their fur from other creatures, not only for modesty, but also for warmth and comfort. He had been rather put out that she had ruined his to better inspect his alien body. Men, he had said, could tolerate the bitter winds of the far north by hiding in the skins of the whales, sharks, fish, and dolphins of land. They could shed and regain their stolen skin as the selkie to the south did their own seal’s skin, adjust for the temperature of the land on any given day or night, and thus adapt themselves to the world in a manner that her people never had.

For her, for her people, the idea of being a skin thief had never occurred to her. There had been neither a need nor a desire, any desire, in fact, would likely have been labelled as heresy. Even for all her love of men and their kingdoms in the sky, she had never thought too closely on where their strange fur came from.

The further north she went though, following the freezing current, the more and more she began to dream of that the burning flowers of land he had called fire, the ones humans kept in glass cages called lanterns. She dreamed of the sun warming her skin, and for a moment, she wondered if stealing the pelt of a seal would be enough to brace her from the cold. Her fingers turned blue even as they gripped at her spears and her knives, the animals changed color and shape and became entirely unfamiliar. Great, hulking, four-legged white sharks of land pawed at the water with claws on their hands, waiting for whatever poor fool of a white seal chose to gasp for air through holes in the ice. The ice, the ice arched above the waves, floating, as if they were islands in and of themselves.

And as she’d remembered from brief trips away from the shore when younger, to the very edges of the territory of her kingdom, his eyes had held all the pale blues and greens of the great ice islands.

For that alone she lingered, lingered despite the cold, the pain, and the aching loneliness, hunting what she could and travelling in the strange sculpted underbellies of the ice. When she looked out at the stars, no human or merfolk in sight, she noted how bright they seemed, and how above her head at night a great weaving rainbow would dance along the dark sky in greens, pinks, and blues.

And for moments like that, as she stared up at the wonder of the world, she would almost forget that she had tried and that she had failed. Bitterly failed, to the point where, even if her relatives had not thrown her out, she likely would have gone into a self-imposed exile.

How could she live in a world, a kingdom, that could not see what she had always been able to see? How had she ever lived in such a world? So, she thought as she travelled, as she shivered and hunted and stared, perhaps that was what she needed now. To find a kingdom that she could stand to live in.

On her way south again, she dove into the depths of the sea, far beyond the light of the sun, and came across the strange shadowy monsters who lurked in the dark. Horrifying squids as tall as any tower, dark eyes reflecting the fire of her hair as they drifted by, octopi that changed not only form but color as they swept by like a foul current in the water, and fish that provided their own light, stars held by threads of flesh, and dangled them in front of to lure unsuspecting and reverent prey into their jaws.

There was beauty and horror here, almost as alien to her as the world of the humans, yet still accessible with a mermaid’s tail. However, it was so very dark and cold, the water filled with cruel creatures who gladly fed upon their own brothers, and for all that it wasn’t the kingdom beneath the sea without light, without warmth, it was not a world she could even linger in.

A slow, churning, desperation began to gnaw at her stomach.

“I will go south,” she said to herself as she swam, her voice echoing in the wilderness among the cry of mating whales, “Far south towards the sunlight and the warmer waters.”

And it was warmer there, the sunlight stayed throughout the year, the water almost uncomfortably hot for it. The game was plenty, the sunlight would beat down strongly, white clouds would roll through, and yet…

And yet for all the beauty there it still wasn’t enough, she was only distracting herself, and with time and distance she knew it. She became certain that no matter how far she travelled, no matter what depths she plunged to or how far south, north, east, or west she went, it would never be enough.

Her only true hope, not only for happiness, but for meaning in and of itself, was in the world the humans had conquered and shaped for themselves. Tom, the prince’s, world that he had so casually taken for granted.

How she envied him for that sometimes, when she thought over that meeting they had once had, how dismissive he had been in his own world and how interested in hers. There was a great and bitter irony in that, she couldn’t help but think. Of course, he was likely a man by now, or approaching it if men aged the way the merfolk did.

Yes, he’d be taller, as other men were, his strange legs longer and stronger than they’d been in youth, braided with muscle the way the merfolk’s arms and torsos were. His face would be leaner, his cheekbones higher, and she imagined that he would retain that ethereal beauty that had clung to him as a child. More, his eyes, those strange pale blue eyes, would surely be the same…

As she sat on a rock, listening to the gulls and staring out towards the shore, she wondered if he had married, if he’d taken a mate, as she undoubtedly would have if she were not herself. Would he have children by now? More, with his human life and human wonders, would he have forgotten her?

Something about that idea, more than the endless ocean, more than the bleak knowledge that the sea had limits she had long since surpassed, both enraged and terrified her.

So, in the end, there was only one thing to do.

They had said, her relatives and others, that there was a sea witch at the edge of the waters of the kingdom. They said that great whirlpools raged in front of the cove that was her dwelling, that no seaweed or kelp would grow there, and that the bones of drowned men littered the barren sand. White bones clutching still at their glittering golden stones and the rotted pieces of their ships, dark holes where their eyes had once been, and their immortal souls long since departed.

They said that, for a price, she would grant you a wish.

The prince had believed in magic, in miracles, he had thought he’d found them in her if not in his own father but…

“But miracles,” she finished for herself, alone with only the indifferent gulls to listen to the sound of her voice, “Have prices.”

Had it not been the same in his own tale, the tale that bore her name, Nøkkerosen? The fisherman had received his game, his family had survived, but for the price of his beautiful daughter. For the strength of her own wish, one that was far more than simply food or resources but a transmutation of her body and the gift of a human soul, the price would have to be truly great and truly terrible.

“And yet,” she asked herself as she stared out towards the distant coastline, warmed by strong sunlight, unfamiliar plants blooming and swaying in the breeze and waving spindly leaf colored arms towards her, “What do I have here that is worth not paying an ultimate price?”

Nothing, she had nothing. She had the wonders of the sea, but they were so pale in comparison to people, humanity, the dream she held that was humankind.

As with her speech before the kingdom, before the king’s beautiful daughters, if she did not take her chance now with her own two hands then she would cease to be a living thing at all. She might as well become nothing but sea foam, if she was to live an eternity with fear.

In a way, had it not always been coming to this?

There was no answer to her questions, both spoken aloud or silent, but none the less a cool and determined confidence filled her. Without question or hesitation, she retraced her path, heading not to the familiar cove of her relatives but instead to the strange and murky lair of the sea witch.

It was almost like the depths, the pits of the sea that she had descended to in exile, they were on the edge of a great cliff where down, deep in the dark, the great beasts of the ocean waited for the unwary. As she had been told the bones of men did litter the sand before the cove, whirlpools raged, and nothing at all was growing around them. From the cave, she could hear the sound of mad cackling, barking and unpleasant in a way that it was unnatural to the merfolk whose songs so often sang men to their deaths.

There, just outside of the cove, was a hideous elderly mermaid, whose youth and beauty, if they had ever existed, clearly had departed her many years ago. With both hands she fed the bleeding meat of hunted fish to a pit of overly fat eels and sea serpents, hissing and trilling towards her and the flesh she offered them.

“Nøkkerosen, Nøkkerosen, the red water lily,” the woman’s voice rasped as she turned her black, shark-like, eyes towards Nøkkerosen, “I had a feeling, that I might see you here one day.”

“Did you?” Nøkkerosen asked, but this only seemed to amuse the witch further. She cackled, and her eels and serpents hissed with the pleasure of the noise. Nøkkerosen did not dare ask how the witch had known that name or anything else about her even as fear clawed up her stomach and into her throat.

“Proud water lily, pretty and proud water lily, red and dead water lily, you have always wanted what you cannot have,” the witch said, when she smiled, her teeth were jagged like a shark’s, “It is your great, terrible, flaw, girl. The way you want and covet, it will drive you into the arms of despair.”

“On the contrary,” Nøkkerosen said, fingers tightening on her spear and keeping her eyes on the witch and her pets even as she approached, “I was born in the arms of despair and absurdity, I have decided that it is time I leave it.”

“You have decided?” the witch cackled again with delight, her wretched voice echoing in the emptiness of the sea, down into the dark abyss beside her cove, “You have decided? As if it is as simple or easy as deciding?”

“There is no place for me here,” she continued, and speaking the words only made them more real, more undeniable, “There never has been and there never will be.”

“Yes, and so you have decided to become human, taken that little boy’s name for yourself and think to barter for an immortal soul and a pair of stalk limbs where your tail is now and you think this will grant you happiness,” the witch scoffed, shaking her head as if Nøkkerosen was just as much if not more of a fool than she had ever thought.

“Meaning,” Nøkkerosen corrected, “I believe, that it will grant me meaning, if not happiness.”

“Meaning?” the witch echoed dully, “You seek out your prince, win his love, his soul, and his children, and you believe that you are not asking for happiness? Girl, what makes you think the humans know anything of meaning?”

She had never been one for faltering, not before her relatives, nor a kingdom, and certainly not this witch, “It is what I choose to believe.”

The witch regarded her, taking her in piece by piece, and finally that jagged smile returned to her lips, “You are a strange one. A fool, destined for tragedy, hardship, and heart break, but you have such conviction that I almost believe you.”

The witch then turned back into her cove, motioning for Nøkkerosen to follow. She did so, taking note of the algae growing on the walls of the cave, the dark shadows in each and every corner, and how the witch did not seem to mind the dark at all.

“For your human soul, you will need to win that from your prince,” the witch said as they entered a circular portion of the cave, over a carved bowl filled with strange plants and the blood of fish, “He must love you, more than he has loved any woman, his mother, his father, his brothers, his sisters, or even his children. He must marry you both in heart and soul so that his mind echoes with your presence. If he does not, if he turns and forsakes you for another, your heart and bleed out like that girl in your story, and at the next sunrise you will turn into sea foam as if you had never existed in the first place.”

The prince, she had not thought about him, no… That was a lie, she had, she had always been thinking about him. True, he had come to represent far more than he was, a prince of this kingdom called Denmark. However, so much time had passed yet…

Yet would she have it any other way? Would she stumble on land and look for anything but him first? And once, once he had promised her half of his human soul, surely, he would remember that when she found him again.

Yes, she thought of his eyes, pale and blue, and his smile, so white and tender, she knew he would remember it. And she would believe that, in one manner or another, he had been waiting for her in the way that she had been waiting for him.

And suddenly, she wanted him, the prince, Tom, more than she had wanted anything in the world.

So, swallowing, and nodding, she nodded and said, “I understand.”

Then, her eyes flashing, and voice cold and weighted like the spear she carried in hand, she asked, “However, witch, what exactly is your price?”

“Ah, you are informed,” the witch said, again amused, as if Nøkkerosen was this strange glittering, foolish, thing that had drifted into her lair, “So many aren’t.”

Then, considering her and the beginnings of her potion, the witch said, “In return for the gift of my potion, of transmutation, to turn your beautiful tail into hideous human legs, I require the best from you in return.”

Nøkkerosen stiffened, her eyes wide, her breathing shallow as she sought to think of what could possibly be the best of herself. Would it be her hands? Her eyes, perhaps? Her heart? Or perhaps her firstborn child, the potential of what she could have.

“Some might say your mind, is the key,” the witch mused, “Such a mind it is, like no other in all the ocean, and it is a blessing and a curse, but it is all that you are. However, no, there is something far greater than even the power of your thoughts and the worlds you build inside your head.”

The witch, with a single bony finger, pointed to Nøkkerosen’s lips and then down to the pale column of her throat, “Your voice, it is pleasant but not the most beautiful in the sea. It does not move one to tears or joy as the king’s youngest daughter’s would nor would it drive the strongest willed of men into lust and damnation. However, your voice is the key to your thoughts, the means with which you have so valiantly tried to reach the world and paint your dreams for us. Without your voice, without language, you are very nearly thoughtless, a memory the sea once had, trapped inside your own shell of a body without any means of getting out.”

The witch’s smile grew, grew and grew, and her jagged teeth were stained with dried and rotted blood, “Yes, it is your voice, Nøkkerosen, that I shall take.”

She swallowed, once, then twice, blinked, and her own voice felt like it was already fading, dying into a whisper, as she asked, “Without my voice, without words, what is even left of me? How can I ever hope to win his…”

The witch cut her off dismissively, “You have your eyes, don’t you? Such a pretty green they are, he’ll never find another pair like them. Your hair, too, it traps sunlight even in the darkest of places, doesn’t it? Not to mention your body, your elegance of movement, the kind that no mere human would ever be capable of no matter how long they have had to become accustomed to their legs.”

Nøkkerosen could not help a grim smile as she shook her head, “That is not me, not even close.”

“Have you lost your determination, little water lily? Do you hesitate to spill your heart’s blood when the nøkke smiles up at you from the waters of the lake?” the witch taunted, “Is all the worlds of men not worth it simply because you cannot sing its praises?”

She closed her eyes for a moment, tried to hear the echoes of her own voice, cling to it, to language, to laughter, even as she said, “Better to be mute and trapped in my own head than screaming at an indifferent wasteland.”

She opened them, eyed the witch, and nodded, “I’ll pay it. For the price of legs, for a human soul, for the kingdom of men and heaven, I will pay your price!”

The witch began to work meticulously, stirring the ingredients of her bowl with the long-curved bone of a whale, like the one that shaped Nøkkerosen’s spear. The witch cut the palm of her hand, the black blood lazily drifting into the pot where it flashed then began to bubble, as if a thousand voices were screaming inside of it yet could not break free of the surface. New ingredients were thrown in, eyes, limbs, kelp, coral, and finally it was done, calm and clear, as if it was still water at the surface of the sea on a day without tide or wind.

Then, the witch reached over to Nøkkerosen’s throat and cut at it with a blackened nail. She felt herself choke, gag, the feeling of something sweet and pure pouring out of her throat along with her own blood. She reached for it desperately, but it was already gone, floating away from her, leaving her gasping and gagging for words and sound.

Using a discarded human bottle, the witch filled the glass with the draught, then handed it to Nøkkerosen, “There, your humanity for your voice, as promised.”

She then motioned to the front of the cave, “Now, Nøkkerosen, to the shores by the palace to find your prince. Drink it before sunrise on dry land and you shall have your legs and your chance for the prince’s heart.”

Nøkkerosen, bitterly, mutely, nodded and bowed her appreciation, ignoring the witch’s leer and her hungry glittering eyes. Swiftly, without looking back for either her relatives or the palace, she swam towards the shore, finally all the way to the beach itself which she had never quite dared to approach.

There, on the sand, she looked out at the stars, fading now in the early dawn light. She reached tentatively towards her throat, sore and empty, tears brimming in her eyes as she thought of the loss of it. The witch, she thought with a smile, had chosen very well.

As bright orange and pink light lit the horizon she turned her attention the bottle, to the sparkling clear liquid inside. With a frown she closed her eyes and pushed it to her lips, forcing it down her throat. It was a bitter fire, tearing down through her stomach and into her tail, and if she had the ability to cry out all the men in all the kingdoms would have heard her scream of agony. She bit at her hair, forced the salt down her aching throat as she felt a thousand swords sawing through her tail and cleaving it in two.

The world seemed to tilt with pain, the sunrise darkening back into night, and she fell backwards into silent unconsciousness even as her body continued to endure unbearable, silent, pain.

When she woke up, she rose, blinked to see a pair of legs, just like his had been, long enough to match her body with the same knobs of bone in the middle that served as the elbow of the leg, the same thin strange useless hands that made the feet, and the same pale tone of skin as her upper half had always been.

She was missing… She was missing the third leg that he had had, dark matted hair in its place along with strange hidden folds. She supposed this didn’t matter, or perhaps was a sign that it had been a deformity. He had been strangely ashamed of it, hiding it from her view, but it hadn’t seemed to be personal, more an ingrained and necessary habit like caring for one’s tail or being wary of the open sea filled with predators.

Still, she stared out at the sea, a smile growing on her face as she stood on her feet, as strangely graceful as the witch had promised, despite her never having owned a pair of legs before. Each step was filled with pain, like a thousand rocks stabbing into the soft untried skin of her feet, yet she still grinned. She endured, and she grinned, as she felt a maddening sense of joy that she had never known before.

She threw her arms out wide towards the sea, tilting her head back, and giving out a joyous and beautiful cry that would have shattered the hardest heart of any man.

And though the words would no longer come, she never the less cried out, “I am here! I have done it! I am home!”


	4. Act I, Scene iv

_“Remember!’ said the witch. ‘Once you have taken a human form, you can never be a mermaid again. You can never come back through the waters to your sisters, or to your father's palace. And if you do not win the love of the Prince so completely that for your sake he forgets his father and mother, cleaves to you with his every thought and his whole heart, and lets the priest join your hands in marriage, then you will win no immortal soul. If he marries someone else, your heart will break on the very next morning, and you will become foam of the sea.”_

Hans Christian Andersen

* * *

Act I, Scene iv

* * *

Very quickly her overwhelming joy, her silent shouts and cries as she ran along the beach and skimmed her hands into the water, was overtaken by her far more natural sense pragmatism. Quickly enough, as the sun rose and stole through the sky, casting harsh shadows against everything it touched on land, Nøkkerosen had returned to sitting, folding her legs this way and that as she tried to find purchase in her half-changed form.

That was the first sign, that even something as simple as sitting was… strange, foreign. It wasn’t so much that her grace had abandoned her, running had proved strangely easy for all she had never tried it, for all the physical pain it caused her, as if aided by the miracle she had bought by the witch. However, the idea of having two legs at the end of her body instead of a single tail was an odd one, whenever she consciously acknowledged it she felt uncomfortable, twisting them this way and that and trying to find the way they best fit together.

Then, as she’d stared out at the sea, the sun rising to the center of the sky, she’d tried to put together where she was going from here. First, she thought, she’d find the prince. This had seemed like a great place to start but then she’d stopped, frowned. She’d turned her head around to stare up at the land palace, a place even more imposing and foreboding than the sea palace. The sea palace, for all its towers and even its guards, was an open and airy place, all dwellings beneath the sea were. Merfolk were not confined by air and earth as she seemed to be on land.

She had tried to push off the ground with her feet, to float onto the wind but the weight of the earth had pulled her back down instantaneously, causing her to land on the soles of her feet even as she let out silent desperate curses.

The point was though, she could not simply float her way into the palace, as she might have tried to beneath the sea.

Indeed, climbing the rockface at the edge of the beach, spear and knives strapped to her as bare feet and hands scrabbled for purchase, she saw that there were men who stood guard, in strange glittering fur and colors so bright and beautiful they could belong on the tail of any of the merfolk, at what looked to be the land palace’s only entrance.

Strapped to their waists were glittering sharpened swords, those human inventions which resembled a thinner, more graceful, longer, and far more lethal version of her own stone and whale bone knives. They also carried stranger weapons in hand, a kind that she had seen floating to the sea before, strange contraptions of stone and wood, held together in an odd blunted shape. In water, they had seemed all but useless, on land though…

The sun began to fall as she sat outside the palace, shivering and thinking, her new feet and legs ached with even the slightest hint of cold, feeling raw for all their pale and slender glory. As the sun drifted towards setting she began to feel a dull panic inside of her as she realized that he might not even be there. He had been a child then, and while the king’s daughters had always kept to the palace and always would, it might not be the same for princes or even humans. Who could say where he was now or how she, silent and directionless, would even go about finding him.

Regardless, it was approaching the time of day where she would have to find a land cove to sleep in, guard it from the sharks and the eels, and try again the next morning. However, with each painful step upon a cleared path, made of stone where everything else was covered in strange land-kelp and land-weed, she found no coves or dwellings but instead found herself walking towards smaller human buildings shaped by wood and stone in equal measure, with transparent glass for windows that let in the light but kept in the heat.

It was…

It was more than she had ever imagined, so very different from her own memories of the sea, each building here was a work of art in and of itself. Carved out of so many different materials and so much craftsmanship that even the king of the sea would be green with envy at the sight of them.

Each glowed from the inside, as if lit by a miniature, if softer, sun. As the sun began to set she thought, that in the dark, they looked almost like the angler fish of the great deep, taunting her in with inviting light to descend upon her and devour her flesh.

It was somewhere with this thought, as she stood gaping in front of a building painted white, a golden bell hidden in its tallest tower, ringing out like the joyful cry of the merfolk, that she first heard the shriek.

There was a human, a half-sized one like a child, pointing at her and screaming while a taller older human, likely a woman by the shape of her chest even hidden as it was by stolen furs, clamped a hand over the child’s eyes and glared across at Nøkkerosen in a manner quite similar to her relatives beneath the sea.

“Heavens, girl, where are your clothes?!”

Nøkkerosen blinked, shifted slightly, looking down at herself then across at the woman. She opened her mouth instinctively, to ask what clothes, or more fundamentally, what are clothes, but then stopped when only air escaped from her hollow throat.

“Your clothes, girl, are you daft?!”

At this more humans began to turn, men, women, and children alike all dressed in furs of different sizes, colors, and textures, and yet all stared at her with wide and alarmed eyes. Their expressions at once fearful, disgusted, contemptuous, mirthful, and filled with an overpowering lust for flesh and the hunt.

Under their eyes she found herself drawing out her spear, adjusting her stance to balance better upon the earth even as her feet continued to sting, she felt her face flush but her eyes just wandered the crowd, waiting for the first shark to strike.

She… She had not expected this, she didn’t know what she had expected, but this was not it. Not the hungry and disdainful eyes of human men. No, because that had never been in the prince’s eyes.

A small clack behind her, she turned and caught sight of a man in black fur, a white collar at his throat, with one foot towards her as if he had taken a step from inside the building. He smiled to the crowd, made some motion with his hands, and reassured them, “Not to worry, my children, I am sure she is simply lost and misguided. Go along now, I will see to the girl.”

They left, some more willingly than others, but they still left. That was… An interesting thought, that this man who was not a king had enough authority to act like one. She caught the term father thrown to him in greeting, but he did not seem old enough, at least not by merfolk standards, to have sired so very many children, some who looked weathered and more haggard than he himself.

She lowered the spear and watched as the man opened the door, at first reaching towards her as if to take her by the shoulders, then hesitating and merely motioning for her to follow. Once inside though she stopped, gazing around. It was filled with human inventions, carved angular wooden hollow boxes that were arranged in neat rows facing towards the front, a pedestal stood there, strange dancing golden and red flowers blooming at the end of spindly dripping white stalks in a golden frame. And above this, a window, made not from the clear transparent stone called glass, but something just as transparent and formed of many different colors, coming together to depict the form of a human man, a golden circle wrapped about his head and his dark eyes looking down benevolently upon all who stared up at him.

They walked through the center of the room, Nøkkerosen inspecting each and every corner, until they came to another wooden barrier, which the man then opened and ushered her through. He then held out strange, oddly textured furs towards her, similar coloring to his own, “Here, I am afraid it isn’t much, but I think it is better than nothing.”

She looked down at it for a moment, blinking at them, then looked across at him and realized that he intended her to put them on. To wear them as they were wearing all their furs, indeed he was looking away from her now as if he expected her to do this without his guidance, needed her to do it without his guidance.

She unfurled it, felt about and noted there were holes, holes for the hands and the head and a larger one for the lower half. She pulled it over, taking off her weapons and for the moment placing them on the floor, swimming in the dark waters of the furs until she found air once again, twisting it this way and that until it looked… Well, close enough.

The man looked back, eyebrows raising at the sight of her, lingering on the state of the furs which were not nearly so sleek and elegant as his own were, “Ah, well, I suppose this is close enough for now,” he then smiled at her, a weathered thing on his face which had been beaten down and burned by the sun and the earth, but it was a kind smile or one that attempted kindness as he asked, “Now, I’m afraid I must ask you, what has happened to you, my child? That brought you cold and naked, and so very heavily armed, to the steps of my church?”

She looked at him for a moment, dully, it had been at its heart a simple question, an important one as well. And yet she had no words, there was only the tense silence as they stared at one another, the weight of her voicelessness bearing down upon them both.

“Do you… not wish to say?” the man pressed.

She shook her head, then realized that she had not said no to the idea of not saying, but that she had agreed that she did not wish to say. She then pantomimed towards her throat, opened her mouth as if she was to speak, silently motioned as if she was projecting words, and then a shaking of the head and hands to say that this ability had been lost.

“You are… mute?”

She nodded vigorously, a smile gaining on her lips as she shifted in her strange black furs. He, in turn, regarded her and nodded slowly himself as if this explained some, but not all. He studied her, with dark eyes the color of earth darkened by shadows, seemed to take in every piece of her and found it wonderous, alien, and strange.

“Have you always been mute?”

A shake of the head, no.

“It was an accident then? Is that how you came to be here?”

She stared at him for a moment, not entirely sure how to even say something to the effect of ‘no, then yes’ or ‘it’s complicated’. After all, at its surface the answer could be simple enough, but its heart was a deeper thing. This was no mere accident of fate, of time and circumstance, or a moment of impulsiveness.

She still thought, in many ways, she had always been travelling to meet the sea witch.

He sighed though, interpreting the silence to mean whatever he wished it to mean, leaned back and regarded her, “Do you have anywhere to go, my daughter?”

This, at least, she could try. She stood, allowing the black folds of the furs to shift and arrange themselves to cover her pale legs and brush against the heads of her feet. She motioned all around them, as if it was the world, as if to say, “I have everywhere to go, father.”

However, he did not see it the same way she did, or perhaps he did not see it at all. Without words, without the precise word in its precise place, it was hard to tell what could and could not be grasped by mere hand gestures alone.

“There is a convent not far from here,” the man said, as if she should understand what this means, “The nuns there, I’m sure, will be more than willing to house you and show you the grace of god.”

She studied him for a moment, trying to understand what that had meant, there were words but they were unfamiliar, strange, almost nonsensical against her ears. So instead of hearing the meaning she heard the conjunctions, the words that bled into one another and held the thing together.

However, as she looked at him, studied his face, the grim, pitying, merciful kindness he presented her, she noted that he had spoken of a place not far, of housing…

He was offering her shelter but it seemed more than that, as if he was offering her a means of life, rather than a cove for the darkened night. She lifted her hands, staring at them intently, trying to think of how to ask about time, about places, about people and purposes. Instead she stood, moved to the glass and motioned towards the sun. Then, lefting one hand, she mimicked the movement of the sun across the sky and looked pointedly at the man.

How long?

How long was she to stay with these nuns?

“The sun? Days, how many days?” he asked, incomprehension swarming his features. Then, like a flash, an idea dawned upon him as he thought he realized what she had been asking, “Ah, how long until you can travel there? It is late, but not long, I will write to them in the morning and by the week you should have place to stay.”

She stared at him blankly, looking at how eager he seemed, and for a moment she could only wonder at the weight of the price the witch had taken from her. Here she was in the world of men, across from a human man who though he was not a prince was still human, and they were miles and miles apart from one another.

Slowly, gracefully, she sat back down upon her abandoned wooden chair and listened as the man described where she could sleep within the church and lectured her about a human named Jesus and a greater omnipresent human named God. Meanwhile, his beautiful red flowers danced, wilting at their stems and fading out one by one as their stalks melted into opaque white pools.

When the last of them had died out and the man, the priest and father as he called himself, had excused himself to some other room. She stood, gathered her belongings, and in her borrowed black and white furs walked silently out the door and back into the human village.

It looked different in the night, the lights all gone out and the buildings large and looming, the sky seemed closer than it ever had in the sea, both brighter and darker for it. The stars looked down upon her with a thousand pairs of eyes that glittered in the dark.

However, one building still possessed light and noise and laughter. Cocking her head, she stared at it, tried to untangle the cacophony of joyous human voices from it, then, drawn as if she was any helpless fish in the darkest depths of the sea, she made her way towards it.

They was singing, poor, grating, human singing and stepping inside she saw men clinging to each other and slapping their brothers on the back, red faced and tilting this way and that as if trying to dance upon the surface of the sea. Inside human women with bared shoulders weaved in between groups of humans, serving bottles of golden and brown liquid to cheering and jeering human men.

There were other women too, who instead sat upon the legs of men and weaved their arms about their necks as if they were lovers, their faces were also flushed, their eyes dark, and they pressed their breasts and bodies into the men with high pitched human giggles.

At the sight of her a few men flushed, jeered, and grabbed at the tails of her borrowed furs, “Oh, come on love, aren’t you a pretty one?”

Another grabbed at her, a rather shark-like grin on his own face as he slurred out, nearly falling out of his seat, “A bit unprofessional though, ain’t it, a whore dressed like a nun? Not to mention the giant harpoon and the knives. What are you even supposed to be, love?”

“Come on, pretty thing, you’d best get those habits off!”

There was laughter, even as she wove her way past them, laughter at themselves and their wit as well as Nøkkerosen herself and the hunger they had for her.

However, about halfway through the room she stopped, held to the earth by shock and awe and wonder, for there he was. Older, taller, thin and lithe, still pale, but with those same strange eyes, looking out towards her from across the bar. And reflected in them was that same, instant, surprised and wonderous recognition.

As if he too, had realized he had no reason to see her here or any place like this, but had been looking for her in every corner all the same.

And suddenly it was as if the building, no, the world itself fell away and there was only her and the prince of Denmark.


	5. Act II, Scene i

Act II: The Little Prince

* * *

_“I am looking for friends. What does that mean – tame?’_

_‘It is an act too often neglected,’ said the fox. ‘It means to establish ties.’_

_‘To establish ties?’_

_‘Just that,’ said the fox. ‘To me, you are still nothing more than a little boy who is just like a hundred thousand other little boys. And I have no need of you. And you, on your part, have no need of me. To you I am nothing more than a fox like a hundred thousand other foxes. But if you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world…”_

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

* * *

Act II, Scene i

* * *

Once there was a queen who was anything but beautiful.

The portraits of her in the palace were few and far between, however, if you turned enough corners and you searched enough rooms you might find one or two of a dark-haired, plain, looking woman staring out at you from a solitary frame or else crowded in with her steel-eyed father and contemptuous brother.

Even in a portrait, where the artist had no doubt tried to paint her in a more flattering light, she was at best dull and mousey. However, if you looked closer, if you looked at the portraits that were done by the best painters in all of Europe, then you might notice that spark of unhappy desperation that seemed to have ingrained itself in every cell of her sickly pale skin.

Where Merope Gaunt was not beautiful though, she was the daughter of a wealthy, noble, family, and that was enough to marry her to Charlus, the king of Denmark. And they whispered in the halls, and years after she had left them behind completely, that the queen Merope who was neither pretty nor witty, was little more than a crude and ugly tool to be used by her father, brother, and the king.

The kinder gossips, would whisper and note as they took in the sight of her pining at the window in the latest fashions, colorful fabric that did nothing to gentle the curves of her waist or bring color to her features, that she was desperately unhappy and that with each passing day that unhappiness only grew.

Then, or so they would often whisper when they suspected Tom was out of earshot or else not paying attention, a series of very strange events took place. The queen, ignored by her husband for weeks at a time, would take to wandering the wilderness, riding into the woods and finding the brooks, rivers, and waterfalls, for hours at a time. Often from sunrise to sunset she would be gone entirely, and when she returned her cheeks would be flushed and a spark of light would have entered her eyes as if she had found something out there in the forest that could not be found within a palace.

When the snow came in winter, and she could no longer go out into the woods, she would sit by the window, pale and pining and waiting for something to appear…

Then, as Spring came again, as the flowers bloomed and budded it became clear that the queen herself was expecting. They say the day that the doctors told her, that she wept with despair, because so long as she was pregnant she would be confined like a caged bird to the palace.

The son, the firstborn son of the king, was born on New Year’s Eve, on a dark night when it was snowing. Except, they said that when the king looked down on the child, taking in his pale skin, dark hair, and strange beautiful features that were almost too beautiful to belong to any human child, he’d said, “This is not my son.”

The queen, Tom’s mother, they said, died of childbirth and despair.

For as long as Tom could remember he’d known the story about his mother and her death as well as the many rumors and whispers of illegitimacy that surrounded him. When he was very young, he’d often look at portraits of his father, and then the few of his mother and her family, to search for himself within them. However, as his father the king had said, there wasn’t a trace of Tom in either family tree.

Some said that it was a commoner, if they were feeling kind, some good looking poor fool who had bedded the queen while the king was away. Others though, would talk of the fair folk or the wild river fiddlers and horses, the nøkk, because what God fearing Christian man would have made love to something as hideous as Merope Gaunt?

The king remarried before the year was out, and only a year later, from the king’s new wife Dorea, Tom’s half-brother James was born. James, they said, looked exactly like his father. His hair, his eyes, every inch of him was his father’s son with only bits of pieces of his mother there in his nose or else his cheekbones.

Tom realized only too soon, looking at his brother, that he himself looked nothing like his father.

He wouldn’t have called his childhood lonely, Tom had never really found himself in need of much companionship, and yet he couldn’t help but realize that he was growing up very alone. His days were spent either in study or else wandering the halls of the palace, the nearby shore of the sea, or else the woods as his mother had done during that last year of her life.

Sometimes, he wondered if he was searching for his father, his real inhuman father. He’d dip his feet in a river, staring at the waterfall nearby and would watch the white thundering rapids like horses’ hooves and wait for it to transform into either a beautiful male fiddler or else a great white stallion made of water. However, the river never did change, and sometimes Tom would wonder if it remained as it was because the nøkk was a lie, because it didn’t recognize him, or because as a godless, soulless, creature it simply couldn’t understand concepts like paternity.

Still, for better or worse, it was his life, and he did the best he could with it. Better, he thought, then his half-brother ever could or would, as Tom raced ahead of him in studies both because of his inborn intelligence as well as his own diligence.

It wasn’t until he was eight years old the he would look past all the pretenses, all the polite talking around the issue, and would glimpse the course that his life would take.

“She’s very pretty, isn’t she?”

It was summer, Tom was eight, James seven, and some noble English daughter arrived that morning to the palace for her studies and also, likely, to one day be married into the Danish nobility at some point. However, James rarely thought that far ahead, James in fact rarely thought far enough ahead to think about anything other than fencing and horseback riding.

Tom might only be a year older than him, but he’d always felt this large gap between them because of it, like James was always three steps behind and never even realized it.

However, the English girl, for whatever reason, had caught James’ attention enough to distract him from horses and swords if only for a morning and so both Tom and James were now staring at her as she stared dull-eyed at the tapestry while her maids and keepers discussed her room and board with the palace’s maids.

She was pretty, but not that strange almost too-pretty that Tom himself was, where the thickness of his eyelashes, the almost blue-black color of his hair, and his strange pale-blue eyes made it all too possible to wonder if his father had been human at all. Her skin was creamy and pale, her hair a sort of golden-red color like the sunrise, and her eyes a vivid green.

Even just standing there, staring at unfamiliar portraits and artwork, she drew in the eye.

“I hope she’s nice,” James said, pouting slightly even as he poked his head out from around the corner where he and Tom had hidden to get a better glimpse of her, “And not boring, all the other girls are boring.”

“Girls aren’t exactly encouraged to ride horses and learn how to fence,” Tom pointed out, but James didn’t seem to consider that a valid excuse, that because they hadn’t been given the opportunities or encouraged to learn what Tom and James were learning they should have tried twice as hard to learn it.

“If all she wants to do is sit and gossip and sew then she’s just as boring as everyone else,” James concluded, and then, looking at Tom he said, “I bet she doesn’t though, she doesn’t look like she does.”

Tom had no idea what the girl looked or didn’t look like, he found it hard to believe that just by looking at her from the shadows James could tell she was the kind who prided herself on her embroidery or instead was a secret fencing master. As it was, beyond noting her vibrant appearance, her apparent disinterest in the conversation around her and that quiet unease of being a foreigner in a foreign world, Tom couldn’t tell anything at all.

For a moment, he wondered if it was only French, English, and Latin that she spoke. He wondered if she could even speak Danish or Swedish…

She looked over then, eyes finding his, and he stiffened and pulled back into the corner dragging the pouting James with him.

“Hey, what was that for?!” James asked, and Tom opened his mouth to say that she’d spotted them but then stopped, realizing that for James that wouldn’t be a problem. No one had a problem with James, after all, it was only Tom, Tom skulking about in the shadows out of sight that everyone…

“Whatever,” James said, brushing off Tom’s hand from his jacket, “This is why Sirius, Remus, and Peter never want to hang around you, you know, you can get so weird.”

That wasn’t why they didn’t want to hang around Tom. Oh, maybe it was part of it, they also seemed to like to believe that Tom put on airs but…

James then groaned, looking out through the windows at the gardens, “Oh man, and I have so many tutors coming today too. Every year there just seem to be more of them, I think I have even more than you now!”

And that, that was the moment. Tom stared at James for a moment, then past him and out into the gardens as James huffed, walked away, and stalked off to whatever room he was meeting his own tutors in. Tom realized then that James did have more tutors than he had, more than Tom had now let alone when he was seven.

Tom was the firstborn son, by all rights the crown prince and heir to the throne, he was far smarter than James was, and everyone knew it but…

No one ever said it, they all knew it, but they never said it and now James was getting more and more tutors every year for things like diplomacy, geography, history, mathematics and Tom was…

He ran out of the palace, no studies for him today, and out to the docks and the sea stretching westward, the sun slowly but surely slinking down towards it as the afternoon crept into twilight. Then, without thinking, with only the memory of the staring and the whispering and James running through his head he ran into the boathouse and began to rig himself a small one-man vessel that would carry him anywhere, somewhere, anywhere that wasn’t here.

And for a moment, out on the sea in his boat, ignoring the rocking waves that threatened to capsize him, it was as if he wasn’t anyone at all, certainly not the eldest son of a king who might not be his father at all.

Except, then it was too rough for a small boat, and adjusting the sails and trying to steer it back did nothing as a wave knocked him and the boat off balance, throwing him into the sea. For a moment as he’d sunk he’d looked towards the light, drifting out of reach, and thought that this was such a sad and worthless way to die.

Except, he was more than certain even then, that no one would really miss him.

He never did meet his father, the one everyone thought was his real one rather than the king, but waking up with his lungs burning, naked, a girl with her hand on his skin and his…

Well, vomiting water back into the sea and scrabbling for his knife, he realized that he might not have met his father, but he was at least meeting someone like him.

She looked somewhat like the English girl, except more so, her hair a red even more vibrant and her eyes so green they almost glowed in the dark. She was naked, shirtless as she looked at him from the water in the cave, but more where her legs should have been there was instead a great green fish’s tail.

She was entirely inhuman, yet somehow, more strange and beautiful for it.

And she looked at him as if he was the strangest most miraculous thing she’d ever seen.

His voice stung in his throat, the sea and bile scraping it raw so that every word hurt, “Who are you? What do you want with me?”

“Ah,” her voice was strangely melodic, entrancing even in that single word that did not at all match the chagrinned look on her face, “I thought you were dead.”

“What?”

“It’s very hard to tell,” her eyes narrowed, almost accusing him as if somehow this were his problem, “When we die our bodies turn to sea foam, but you, oh no, you just seem to depart your bodies entirely, leaving them to sink to the bottom of the sea. It’s impossible to tell one way or another!”

James, he couldn’t help but think as he stared at her and her spear and the knife she’d left on the rocks beside his torn clothing, would never have accused this one of only liking embroidery. Some part of that thought filled him with wonder and hope, that here, here he was in a fairy tale come to life and his half-brother would never know about it. This would belong to Tom and Tom alone, this fish-girl, this nøkk from the sea with her great shining kingdoms beneath the surface and the endless expanse of the ocean at her fingertips…

“You should have a name,” he said as dawn approached, his skin cold and shivering but more than willing to stretch every minute just to stay here in this strange world she’d made for him, “A name between us at least, not your real name but… Something that has the spirit of you.”

She smiled, a warm, alien thing that held all the secrets of the sea within it. And so he told her an old folk tale from Sweden, of a lake in the forest of Tiveden, and red water lilies, a poor fisherman, his beautiful daughter, and the nøkk of the lake.

He’d reached out for her hair in the dawn light, twisted it in his fingers, “Your hair is like that, I think, so you should be Nøkkerosen.”

Waking up later, naked on the shore, the only proof of her being the soreness of his throat, head, and his lack of clothing he thought to himself that even if he wasn’t crown prince, even if his younger less able brother would pass him over, even if his father the king would never recognize him…

At least this day had brought him proof of something.


	6. Act II, Scene ii

_“All men have stars, but they are not the same things for different people. For some, who are travelers, the stars are guides. For others, they are no more than little lights in the sky. For others, who are scholars, they are problems… But all these stars are silent. You-You alone will have stars as no one else has them… In one of the stars I shall be living. In one of them I shall be laughing. And so it will be as if all the stars will be laughing when you look at the night sky… You, only you, will have stars that can laugh! And when your sorrow is comforted (time soothes all sorrows) you will be content than you have known me… You will always be my friend. You will laugh with me. And you will sometimes open your window, so, for that pleasure… It will be as if in place of the stars, I had given you a great number of little bells that knew how to laugh.”_

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

* * *

Act II, Scene ii

* * *

But time is a bitter and cold thing, and the world, while beautiful, can also be cruel and unkind.

And ultimately, the tale has no requirement to be a happy one, merely to be something that reflects and refracts light. Shimmering in the distance, like light, perhaps, off the surface of the sea.

The prince of Denmark who was not crown prince, half-fey heir to some unknown brook and waterfall deep within the woods, did not remain eight years old. To be expected he grew and with him so did his brother as well as the English girl, Lily Evans.

Time marched forward more quickly on land than within the sea, for all the beauty of the mountains, the sky, and the sun, mankind pays for these sights and this world of wonders with life and time. And where the mermaid Nøkkerosen would remain a girl for years upon years, defying age, before long he would be a jaded young man and academic.

Whose closest friend was chance meeting in the sea with a girl who had not even been human.

And whose next closest friend was the strange English girl Lily, still in Denmark years upon years later. Who while not a fencer or a rider of horses could be found in the library perhaps more often than was respectable in a woman of her breeding and who had never once seemed to doubt Tom’s humanity…

“It’s likely I’ll marry into Danish royalty,” they were in the gardens, it was summer, and Lily seemed so terribly young for all that she was a year younger than him, “You know that’s why they sent me here. I don’t expect I’ll ever see England again.”

The sunlight caught in her hair, burned through the red and painted it golden, not the same ever burning fire that was the mermaid’s hair but something akin to it. Tom, meanwhile, on a day without studies or books had once again decided to embrace his eccentricity and taken out paints and canvas instead.

He was a hobbyist at best, and his use of impressionism would have him laughed out of any legitimate academy, but all the same something about sketching out the world and the light distracted him from time to time and reminded him that there was far more to this world than simply people.

“You will,” Tom said, eyes drifting back to the canvas, sketching and resketching to quickly perfect the lines before beginning on the colors themselves, “Whoever your family picks, whoever my father picks, the point of marrying you is that you are English. For that alone you will see England again.”

Tom often felt a dull pang of longing for a homeland, a strange thought, as he was in Denmark and had always lived in this palace in Denmark. There was no other homeland to go back to, and yet, sometimes he felt as if his soul was straining against the confines of his body to go and search the fields, the shore, and the woods to find it.

To know what it was you missed, to have a simple name for it like England, Tom envied that.

She smiled, a wry almost coy thing, but didn’t move, “Perhaps, that would be nice, I haven’t seen my sister in years. She was so angry when I went away, and I still don’t know if it was because she wanted to go in my place or…”

She didn’t say that she was jealous of Tom’s relationship with James, which was astute of her as Tom’s relationship with James was best described as strained. Oh, they got along well enough, but James had never been introspective or particularly observant either. As his authority grew so did his own unbound arrogance, and what in a boy had been charm, had in a young man turned into something dreadfully obnoxious (though still boyishly or roguishly charming to many).

Tom was treated something like… Well, something like James’ younger awkward brother who by himself could never hope to dance with a woman or engage in polite conversation. Someone whose nose was always stuck in a book or before a canvas. That Tom was older, and had wit and charisma of his own, was conveniently ignored in favor of James’ juvenile pranks and boorish friends.

They even had a pet name for themselves, the marauders, like they were this exclusive and adorable club of fools.

However, while Tom might seethe, and while bitterness was certainly there, he wouldn’t go so far as to call it hatred for his half-brother.

“Can I move yet?”

Tom glanced up, eyes meeting hers, reading the mirth yet even as he coldly said, “No.”

“Tom, I’ve been sitting here forever,” Lily complained, before slyly adding, “James will come looking for me, you know, and you don’t want to go giving him a head start.”

“You’ve spent years running from James’ affections,” Tom said as he now finally moved to the paints, the base coats with which he would overlay the light on top of it later, “I would think you wouldn’t be hindered simply by me.”

“He can be persistent,” Lily said, shifting ever so slightly but enough to earn a glare from Tom, “And if I’m sitting here patiently waiting for you to finish it gives him that much more of a chance. Besides, it’s very hard to run away in dresses.”

“Having never been forced to wear one, I wouldn’t know,” Tom said, his own lips quirking into a wry sort of smile, however hidden by his canvas. He did not even have to look at her face, as he painted the orange, yellow, red, and white of her hair, to see her pout, “Please resist the urge to make faces at me, the more you do the longer this will take.”

“I thought the idea of impressionism was that you paint quickly,” Lily huffed, though to her credit the pout at least disappeared.

“No, the idea is to capture light, capture what the eye truly sees rather than what your mind thinks that it sees,” Tom corrected even as he began to work more swiftly, “That one has to do this before the light changes is a sad necessity that I, as someone whose not really an artist at all and far too much of a perfectionist, really do loathe.”

“So, you’re just not very good at this,” Lily responded in a rather teasing manner that Tom didn’t necessarily appreciate but had learned to tolerate over the years.

“I’m out of practice,” Tom corrected, “If you’ve noticed, Lily, I have very few willing subjects.”

Trees and landscapes, oh those he had aplenty, same with faded memories of girls from the sea with moonlight in their hair and eyes and morbid fantasies of godless fathers without human souls. But willing participants, ready to sit outside in the midday sun without moving, well, that required someone willing to even stand in Tom’s presence.

And those were few and far between.

“There was a boy from home, you know,” Lily’s voice was softer, her expression distant as her eyes searched somewhere past Tom’s head, “Severus, his family was nobility but also terribly poor, all the same he was my best friend. You remind me of him, sometimes.”

“Should I be pleased or insulted?” Tom asked, as her tone had made it sound as if it could be either, and she laughed.

“Well, you’re a bit more otherworldly and dignified, if that’s what you mean. Severus was always very bright and very cutting with his wit but it’s not quite the same. And his eyes were so dark that they burned, still, all the same, sometimes when you look at me or a book or anything at all it’s almost like I’m seeing what Sev might have become.”

A fond expression then, one Tom could not bring himself to chastise her for no matter how she twisted her face and the light falling on it, “He was always a good friend, and I never really thought of him in a romantic way, but with the way things are… I thought, growing up, that if I had to marry anyone at all then maybe it could at least be a friend. Of course, it was a fool’s thought, Severus was always much too poor and there was nothing to be gained from it.”

Finally, Tom stopped and looked up, painting half finished and the light so very close to changing, he looked at her, captured her in his mind’s eye rather than on the canvas and said, “You will be fine, even if your husband is a bore and a dullard. There is… There is more to life than simply marriage.”

Lily only shook her head in a pitying and perhaps even despairing sort of way, her eyes knowing something that he could not even comprehend, “You’re a man, Tom, there is more to your life than marriage.”

Yes, but he wondered then, only sixteen years old, if there would be marriage for him. It was likely, very likely, for all that he seemed to be overshadowed by James he was still a prince of Denmark and at the very least a tool for alliances. And yet, sitting here in the garden, he could not help but think that he would be alone as he was always alone.

Sketching the shadows of people as they passed through his life.

And when he took the painting back to his room, still half done as the light had escaped them, he couldn’t help but think that however pretty Lily herself was, however fair and bright where his mother was drab and dull, he had captured something of his mother in her face.

Something of her yearning, her trapped desperation, and her despair.

September that very year, fifteen-year-old Lily and James were married at behest of the king of Denmark. And though it wasn’t an unsightly age, though many had been married as young or younger, Tom could not help but think that they looked so terribly young. James was overjoyed, the couple were beautiful, and only Tom stood in the pews and saw his mother’s shadow hanging over them both.

By November she was showing clear signs of pregnancy and was thought to be due in late July or early August.

And Tom catalogued and painted the snow in winter, and perhaps it was a growing talent or the effort put in, but each seemed to capture the bitter winter wind more clearly then the last.

And time, like the rotation of a wheel which turns without thought, without mercy, kept moving forward from Fall, to Winter, to Spring, to Summer again. The boy, a son, Harry, was born with James’ wild dark hair and Lily’s eyes.

And Tom, the ageless, strange, intellectual, art enthusiast uncle.

And Harry would look at him with those bright green eyes, like Lily’s, perhaps even like Nøkkerosen’s, and he would smile up at him without seeing anything at all. Holding up a book or another like an offering and asking in a child’s voice, “Read to me, uncle?”

Then Harry was five years old, a growing boy, the spitting image of his father and his father before him and the delight of the kingdom, and suddenly as the boy’s birthday was celebrated in the midst of summer Tom realized that quickly, quietly, he had been cut out from the line of succession.

Over twenty years old and he had no wife, no children, no legacy, no power, no respect, only the charade of legitimacy sneered at by every courtier in Denmark. He would die a shadowy stain upon his father’s legacy, a forgotten footnote in history, as his fool of a pretend half-brother unwittingly and arrogantly took the crown for himself without a second’s thought for the weight of it upon his head.

So, Tom did what he had never done, what he had cowered and avoided all of his life. What he had nearly drowned himself at sea to avoid all those years ago. Tom stood before the doors of his father’s study, his nephew five-years-old and growing, his brother all but acknowledged crown prince and a fool, and his sister in law slowly but surely forcing herself to tolerate this thing she now called life.

It was dark inside, lit only by a few candles, and his father at the desk looked terribly old and terribly human as he hunched over letters. His voice was worn and weary, finished before he had even uttered a word, “Enter.”

“Father,” Tom said, and then paused, stepping forward and taking in this man piece by piece until all that was left to say was the simple truth that had been burning a hole inside of his soul for years, “I have concerns.”  


The man grunted, “Isn’t it a bit late for this?”

The hour was late, which was undoubtedly what his father the king meant, but there was another meaning ringing in those words. Tom was no longer a child, no longer even a boy, and yet here he was as if his words should matter now.

“There are rumors, father, that you intend James to rule after your death.”

That stopped the scratching of the pen, the very air stilled, and Charlus the king of Denmark looked up from his desk to stare Tom in the eye.

Finally, the pen was set to the side, and the king said, “I suppose that you of all people has the right to know that soon enough they will not be merely rumors.”

“Did it not occur to you, father, that I am still your firstborn son?” the question was bitter, Tom’s voice rough with it, and yet it was so very ironic that neither of them could truly stand beneath its weight.

That Tom was anything but his father’s son.

It then poured out of him, all the unsaid words, the growing anger, as he leaned forward and said, “She was too young, that wife you chose for him, Lily. Only fifteen, sixteen and a mother, and you must know that she only vaguely tolerated James for all that he has been chasing after her through adolescence!”

“And what do you suggest that I should have done,” his father asked, but oh it was not a question, it was a tolerant annoyed thing that stated that he would have done no different no matter Tom’s thoughts on the subject.

Tom stood, eyes burning, his hands fell down onto the table with a loud thud as he said, “You could have at least given her hand to me instead, you must have known I thought about it, that perhaps even she thought about it! But like you do with everything you gave it to James, as you give everything to James if only for the glory of having your face, your hair, and your eyes despite every sign that he is a boy not fit to be a king!”

His father said nothing to that, not in the sense that he had no words to respond but he felt the words themselves were not worthy of a response. Instead, he nodded towards the door, dismissing Tom from the room, and the next morning Tom was given a diplomatic post, a kindly ordered exile, to the Faroe Islands, as far from the world as one could get within Danish territory.

And Tom would stare out at the sun and the sea, at the picture they made and would make perhaps for the rest of his life, even as he pictured Denmark itself and how the court had changed in its life, and sink deeper into his own bitterness and anger.

“Whatever is left for me in this world,” he realized standing on the shore, staring out into the night and the glittering stars, so distant, indifferent, and utterly inhuman, “I must take it for myself.”

Otherwise there was no other choice but to fling himself into the sea and drown himself in despair as his mother had before him.

On the edge of civilization, in lands untouched by God or man, with the woods at his back and the sea before him, Tom refused to be his mother. So, instead, he must become his father, whatever godless and soulless creature that might be. He must be his father’s son.

And time was cruel, to men, nøkk, and kings, and even at the ends of the earth it would tick by second by cruel second. So that one could patiently wait ten years on a small island territory where an insurrection had once been born and put down years before Tom’s unfortunate birth for the death of a king.

Where Tom would be summoned back to Denmark, just like that, invited to drinks and whores with Tom’s idiot half-brother and his friends, so that Tom the perpetual bachelor could have himself a night of fun, and find the mermaid Nøkkerosen wearing a nun’s habit and a pair of human legs.

Her eyes, just as they were years ago, were still so filled with light and her hair, even in the dim lighting of the night and the tavern, a living flame. She looked young, so much younger than he himself, as if she had only barely escaped adolescence despite the many years since that night. Yet, her eyes, her smile, even the very way she caught the soft light of candles was unmistakable. And Tom, where he had once been a half-human child, was now the bastard godless son of a river fiddler and a banished prince.

So, he reached out to her, the whooping and whistling of the marauders at once so very distant, and as he took her soft and pale hand in his and pulled her up the stairs to a purchased room, and his mind spiraled downward into dark plans and pits and internal hells which even Tom had not known existed inside of him.


	7. Act III, Scene i

Act III

* * *

_“Besides, do any of us understand what we are doing? If we did, would we ever do it?”_

George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion

* * *

Act III, Scene i

* * *

They climbed strange carved ridges in the building, at jagged and clear-cut angles that the wind and the sea would never carve into stone naturally, and with hardly a word and only the laughter of his companions behind them he pulled her into a smaller darker room. Without a word he closed them off from the outside world with a soft push against the wooden barrier that stood between them and the laughter and noise of the bottom layer of the building, and then it was quiet.

Quiet and dark until, with a swift jerking motion and a small wooden stick in hand, he cultivated life into that small flickering blossom known as fire, sprouting it from an invisible seed into something fully in bloom in only a moment then replanting it onto a tall, white, dripping stem like those she had seen in the first building with the man wearing strange human black furs.

After this was done, he finally turned to look at her again, the flower painting strange golden shadows on his face as he held it up by its golden pot, peering closely at her features as if he could hardly believe he found her inside of them.

“So, you have gotten yourself a pair of human legs,” he noted, and it was a small thing, yet there was something almost like the merfolk in his voice, something that compelled and drew in without the slightest bit of effort. Even a small musing like that, and his words sang.

She opened her mouth, the words ready to fall out at any moment, about the years and the sea and the journey, and then the emptiness of her own throat caught up to her. The price, she thought almost with desperation, it had been such a good price.

She closed her mouth then, swallowed her bitterness and frustration, and settled for vigorous nodding as well as the wiggling of her strange, new, bottom fingers that stuck out from the hands of her legs.

He stared at them along with her, and at his gaze she rolled up the robes to reveal the legs more fully, the matching paleness of them with the rest of her and their glorious symmetry.

“And you still haven’t learned any human shame,” he muttered, his eyes trailing down her leg and back again, an odd glint inside them that she couldn’t quite place, but then he looked back up at her face, a crooked smile growing on his lips, “They’re very nice, Nøkkerosen. They suit you.”

She smiled back, a far more sunny and cheerful thing, because he really had gotten to the heart of it as she’d hoped he would. The legs were more than just legs, after all, they were opportunity and…

“You’re very quiet,” he noted, and his voice cut through her thoughts the way the cold of the northern sea had cut through to her bones.

Her smile fell, her voice remained missing, and all she could do was motion to her throat, to her lips, motion the words falling out, and then simply shake her head.

And if she’d had the words she would have said, “I would that I could,” or perhaps “I have always had too many words and too little time to say them in” or else, “Miracles and magic have prices, prince”.

However, as it was, she had no words at all.

With that thought she looked past him and out of the clear stone, the glass, of the window and towards the bright moon overhead and the glittering stars. She slowly sank onto the strange wooden carved rock, covered in human pelts and oddly soft, almost as if inside it were made of water or something close to it. Her feet, as soon as she brought them of the earth, ached viciously.

No wonder, she thought, he had aged so quickly in comparison to her. To burn so brightly, to endure the wonders and hardships of the earth, it must steal ages and ages of your life away…

“You… can’t speak,” his voice jarred her thoughts, she looked back over, caught him leaning over her, his eyes lit by the red and golden flower and for a moment just as wide and pale as she remembered.

She nodded slowly, a wry and bitter smile on her lips.

Then, looking down, she pointed towards the human legs then back towards her throat. The price, the legs were not free. Nothing, she thought, in this world or any other was truly free. The father, she thought, for however kind and weathered he seemed would not have understood this.

However, the prince’s eyes were clearer, and he looked longer, looked past her strange new human furs as he knelt down in front of her, lifting one of the legs gently to inspect it. More, perhaps it was as he’d claimed, being half in the human world and half out of it, he could see more of her world than he had any right to.

So, it was only after a moment that he said, with dawning realization, “You traded it for your legs, didn’t you?”

Except, hearing it like that, spoken so plainly by someone who was not herself…

His hands moved to one of hers, taking it from her and squeezing it gently, “It’s not so bad trade, many humans waste the spoken words they do have and seem to do just fine. Not to mention that there’s always reading and writing…”

He must have caught sight of her confusion, her wide-eyed incomprehension, and suddenly she wondered just how vast the distance was between them. He looked around the room, as if searching for something, before looking back at her, “Words, spoken words can be transcribed onto paper… carved onto stones as a sort of code. Symbols can represent sounds or ideas, so that you don’t have to speak it, hear it, to know it. I can show you, teach you, later.”

It was…

It wasn’t quite as if a weight had come off her shoulders, slid down to the floor and brought back the buoyancy and lightness of the sea, but like something bubbled up inside her like brief bursts of air floating towards the surface. Without thought she was moving towards him, embracing him too tightly his hands at first fluttering like small nervous fish around her head and then settling onto her waist and circling around her back.

Small drops of the ocean, whatever was left of the sea inside of her soul, began to roll out from her eyes in great drops, her body shuddering with the effort and her absent voice crying out somewhere beneath the waves.

He said nothing, just drew small circles on her back with his hands, waiting until the shudders died down. Then, slowly, he moved so that he was sitting with her on her small, soft, human ledge and gave a rather soft smile towards her.

However, too soon, in the silence it disappeared and faded, something colder taking its place. Except, she didn’t think this was aimed at her, no, this was the expression she thought that he now resorted to.

This was what time and the wind had carved him into.

Finally, he asked, so simply as if it was a question she could possibly answer, “What are you doing here, Nøkkerosen?”

How, she thought, was she to possibly explain? How could she explain if he could not understand already? How did he not look at her and know that she had come all this way solely for that promise… For that divine human spark that he himself possessed and thought so little of.

All she could do, she thought, was just motion to him, a wide sweeping thing as if to say, “For you and all that you are, all that you have the potential to be, for the great second sun that is called mankind.”

“For me?” he asked, a bit of a laugh at the end of that, “You came all this way for me?”

Then, taking in her unamused expression, the insistence in her gaze his laugh became louder as he said, “No, for mankind itself? I’m afraid, Nøkkerosen, that you’ll find us woefully disappointing.”

At her expression, the sharpness of her eyes and the stony cast to her face, he assured her softly, “It’s true, and if either of us would know I would think it would be me. I’m sure you don’t believe me now, but you’ll see soon enough. I suppose it’s too late to go back now but… If you come to regret this, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

And by the look on his face, the light dancing in his eyes, he was more than certain she would come to regret her bargain with the sea witch.

Deciding to move the topic of conversation forward, or as forward as she could, she motioned towards him, a sharper sweeping motion, as if to ask what had happened to the prince of Denmark she had met so long ago. What brought him to this strange place and time where their currents in the sea met one another?

“What about me?” he asked, waiting for her nod before stating, “Well, life has been… difficult, of late. You are lucky I am here at all, I only arrived in Copenhagen a fortnight ago from the Faroe Islands.”

At seeing, at remembering, her lack of knowledge of these strange named things, these places he and humankind had gone and labeled for themselves, he said, “It is far, very far, almost as far as one can get in Denmark from here or anywhere of import. And I was… I was governor of that small those small islands for so very long.”

There was something darker in that statement, a shadow passing over his soul and his eyes as he said it, but like a distant storm it passed over leaving a dull flatness in its place, “My father, the king, is dying, and thus even unacknowledged godless bastard sons are to be recalled from the edges of the kingdom. On his death, my younger half-brother, James, with an heir of his own and myself written out of succession, will be crowned king of Denmark.”

He laughed, bitterly, seeming to see far past her and into the shadows of his own life, words she could hardly follow but said in a bitter angry tone that she could more than understand, “And as for myself, I’m not sure, either I’ll be perfectly superfluous or else an unwilling advisor to my idiot brother. Time alone will tell, I suppose, and how fond James likes to believe he is of me. Or, what he chooses to know of me.”

Finally, he looked over at her, an odd almost soft expression on his face, “And yet, of all the times and all the places, you choose to reappear now dressed both as a whore, a warrior, a maiden, and a nun… And I am still glad to see you.”

His hand lifted for a moment, brushed her cheek, twirled in her red curls, and then removed itself as he asked, “And what of you, where will you go now, what will you do with these legs of yours?”

She paused, hesitated, not sure how to say what she wanted or that there had been no plan but to find him and only now did that stark fear come to realization that he had not thought the same. That she could not simply swim into his life as if she had never left it, as if she hadn’t been some strange moment and…

“I can take you to the palace,” he said, and his hand returned to her hair, not seeming to notice how her eyes looked towards his, wide and green and full of hope, “For the scandal and shock alone of inviting a girl-whore whose features are more fey than even mine, I think I would invite you to the palace… I can teach you how to read and write, how to paint, how to… How to impersonate a human woman. I can show you the world, more than just a few tales told in a grotto by a child. If you want to, Nøkkerosen, you can come with me.”

She moved in then, wordless and voiceless as always, but her body pressed against his as the moonlight did and the light of his flickering flower, sinking lower and lower on its wilting short-lived stalk. Her lips touched his and as they did his hands moved towards her back, wandering upwards and pressing her closer, sliding her more fully against him.

One hand moved beneath the furs given to her by the man who called himself father, up pale, smooth, new legs inch by inch. Then, he moved backwards, looking down at her for a moment with eyes that were both like hers and not like hers at all. A pale reflection, she thought, of her own eyes.

And she thought of the witch then, without truly knowing why, the witch and her second price, her second condition for a human immortal soul. That she must wed the prince, that he must turn to no other and…

Slowly, he lifted the furs from her skin, leaving it pale and yet bright in the darkness, as if there was a light within her that neither of them could truly see. She wondered, as his lips wandered her skin, his hands searching her body with a growing fervency, as he took off his own darker, finer, pelts and pressed his matching skin closer to hers, his odd third leg rising against the inside of her legs, if he was looking for the source of that light.

Warming his hands and skin against it, as he might with the dying golden flower which was now almost drowning inside of its golden pot, or as she might have, in days gone by, stretched herself out on a rock in the south beneath the great eye of the sun…

She didn’t know, even as he whispered things unintelligible against her ear with pale eyes only half open, if he found what he was looking for.

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally published on fanfiction in gratitude to the wonderful rhombusgirl from tumblr who has made too much fan art of my work for me to handle without offering something in return. She asked for a Little Mermaid crossover and so Morilden was born.
> 
> Now, to those about to embark on this adventure I caution you to both heed and not heed the tags (great advice, I know). So, why should you heed them? If you can't handle the pairings then you're going to have a bad time. Period. On the other hand, this world is so divorced from Harry Potter canon, even the canon of Lily and the Art of Being Sisyphus that I laugh in the face of the characters, their relationship to each other, and who they are in the original story.
> 
> This is one of those stories where if I just changed the names around I could publish this as original content.
> 
> Still, it is what it is.
> 
> Comments, kudos, and bookmarks are greatly appreciated.


End file.
